life as understood

By now, you must have noticed it. Of course you have. This blog, you've said, doesn't have a theme, a brand, an essence. It's alternately witty and sappy, trivial and overblown, and pretty much every entry is too long. If you hadn't noticed it, don't feel bad. I noticed it a long time ago, but I never did anything about it. That's probably worse.

Why is it that we blog, again? Remind me. For me, maybe my writing voice is the voice I wish was my speaking voice. Maybe it's because I no longer keep a journal. Maybe I just want to be heard. But some of the world's most annoying people are those who just want to be heard. Yes, it's not the most ignoble of desires, but it spawns some bad stuff. Either way, there are something like 13 million blogs out there (made it up), so no one's really getting heard anyway.

I remember remarking to my friend Blaine once in an Indian restaurant in a gas station that I thought that writing, for me, represented the most likely opportunity for me to make a real "mark on the world" or something like that. I'm pretty sure I still believe that, but I don't know if I care anymore. Writing for me, I think, represents the thing that makes me feel the best, the most productive. That's what it is. And when someone might stumble in the door and read it on accident, it forces some degree of accountability.

This next three weeks might represent the longest vacation I'll have until I retire, assuming I find a job someday. So here's this: I'm going to do my best to write here at least two or three times a week until winter quarter starts and we'll see what comes out of it. Maybe I'll figure out why it is I do this, and what form future postings might take. It might suck for a bit (see "Searching for Teen Wolf" or this entry), but I have hope for a brighter future.