Contributing to the conversation

Very recently, a relative of mine was starting to wonder about the value of her liberal arts major, which led me to think about my own educational choice. Let me be very clear up front: I have never regretted getting my degree in English. Point and laugh if you want, but there's value there that most people overlook. In the case with my cousin, her studies were called into question by some business major friends of hers. (I'm working on an MBA right now, so I understand that point of view too, I just don't agree with it.)

"What's your major?" is typically the first question students ask each other on a college campus. The second question is typically also a standard, but the answer to the first question determines the intensity.

"So what are you going to do with that?"

As I fielded that question, people generally assumed that I was going to be a teacher. English is only good for teaching more English, is the thought process there. My plan was to be an editor. And for the record, I'm a damn good editor, but that's not how my life has worked out. We make plans and God laughs, as the saying goes. I've been working in business for the last 10 years or so, doing just about every kind of business writing you can think of. Sure, I've done some editing, using what I thought I would be doing with my degree, but it seems like the real strength of my education has been in finding application of what I learned in school in places that aren't clear applications.

I'll probably share these from time to time, but the first application is what's leading me to write this blog post. It's all about contributing to the conversation.

Where I studied English, we had to study a major author and had a choice between Milton, Shakespeare and someone else that I don't remember. The key here is that these are major authors, their writing has been around for centuries and commented on by some of the greatest literary minds of history. I took the class on John Milton and one of the requirements was to write a research paper, using a topic that hadn't been addressed before.

When I read that project description in the syllabus, I kind of freaked out. One of the most famous commenters on Milton's work is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Yes, that one. (I realize I'm a giant dork.) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner author, Samuel Taylor Freaking Coleridge. And that was also hundreds of years ago. What could I possibly come up with that could even compete with what Coleridge and hundreds of scholars since him have said about Milton?

As the assignment got closer, I voiced my concern in class and the professor looked at me and said, "I just want you to contribute to the conversation."

The paper I wrote didn't have to be groundbreaking, earth-shattering or paradigm shifting. He just wanted us to be informed and express our own thoughts, the main point there being that the thoughts had to be ours. And then we had to share them, we couldn't keep them to ourselves.

That led me today to be thinking about what conversations do I want to contribute to. What do I care enough about that I don't mind putting in some work to learn about it and then contribute to the conversation about it? Sure, we have Facebook and Twitter and, well, blogs like this one where we share thoughts of all kinds, ranging from what food we ate, where we are right now to having fantastic ideas that we should legitimately share. And I'm as guilty as the next person when it comes to creating my own noise to drown out good thoughts, but it's important to contribute your own thoughts to the conversations you've got an emotional investment in rather than sitting back and just letting the opinions of everyone else just wash over you.

Create something. It doesn't have to be big, it just has to be yours.

The real reason

I've been thinking a lot recently about books and their future (or lack of one, depending on your camp). Then I started trying to figure out what is it that makes me inclined to keep the printed dead trees around and the answer's rooted in the ridiculous (like most of my thoughts) but at second glance is really very practical and realistic.

Big Brother is watching.

Come on a journey with me. It starts with Winston Smith, the protagonist of Orwell's 1984, which if you haven't read, you absolutely must. No hyperbole here because the book has so completely become part of our cultural heritage that you can't consider yourself culturally literate without having read it. From this point on, I'll just assume that you've read the books I refer to and if not, you can add them to your list of things to read. Winston's return to humanity, his reconnection with beauty is possible through his connection with Julia and with information outside the system, information not created (or more importantly, uncreated) by the Ministry of Truth.


That led me to the similar society of Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Montag makes his living by burning books, routing public information and molding public opinion through the wall-sized televisions that are ubiquitous. Depictions of complex emotions and dissenting viewpoints have no place in the tele-plays and it is Montag's job to make sure that any books found don't complicate society's complacence. The parlor is the ultimate in simulating a connection between people, but it lacks any emotional content, which is one of the reasons Montag decides to read one of the books. The emotion rekindled in him and the questions he asks of his society are results of his relationship with literature.

The Eloi watch someone drown

Next, to the Eloi in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. They had no books, were perfectly content because they didn't have to do anything to provide for themselves and they still had everything they needed. Initially, their society looked like a utopia, but the lack of curiosity and mysterious appearance of food leads the traveller to look a little deeper at what's behind it all. After returning to his own time, he goes back to the future of the Eloi with three books from his shelf, the book ending with the question of which three books he took with him.


I thought about the stories I heard while I was living in the former Soviet Union about how certain books or albums were illegal to possess and they got shared in secret, passed from one person to another under fear of the KGB finding them. The literary situations are not outside the realm of possibility because I've heard stories from people who lived through it. I think that's why I believe in the future of printed books; there are still unanswered questions about the lifespan of a digital book. What happens when a powerful group gets control of the Kindle distribution system and deletes copies of 1984 from everyone's Kindle? Don't roll your eyes, that one already happened. What happens if the government decides that it's finally going to do something about Allen Ginsberg and puts something like a wiretap on the internet but rather than intercepting information, it removes all of his writings? What if something catastrophic happens and we don't have batteries or a way to charge up our e-readers? I admit that last one is a pretty remote possibility, but it's still possible. Even less possible is that you may come into possession of a time machine, travel to a future where humans have lost their curiosity, creativity and emotion and need to have some references to help them regain their humanity. But still, that may come up.


The value of printed books is in their permanence and reliability. They can be moved around outside the quick and light regular system of information, they resist revisionism, they give voice to the unpopular. It's an enduring record and fulfills the need that Writing the Body literary critics give for male authors to leave a creation that's undoubtedly theirs. It's an object that effectively conveys the declaration of the author that "I was here and I created something."

Julia Kristeva

Sure, it's convenient to have such easy access and portability of a text by using something digital, e-readers are getting cheaper to the point where they're almost disposable and the texts are infinitely reproducible at almost no cost, but there's something to be said for having a copy of something in a format that's a little harder to wash away with an errant magnetic field or some computer algorithm.


In college I had a History of Civilization class taught by the Special Collections librarian. He showed us the oldest text the university library had in its collection and he walked around with what looked like a little rock. I'd seen pictures of cuneiform writing before, heard about it in high school history classes, but here it was. A document surviving from the Babylonians, thousands of years old! Someone asked the question we all wanted to know, "What does it say?" The librarian looked up and smiled. The oldest document in the library of the most stone-cold sober university in the United States was "a receipt for beer." There were a number of ironic things about that, the first being that the university was so pleased to have this "book," which was actually a receipt for beer and anyone drinking beer at the university would have been in violation of the strict Honor Code. The other irony for me was that of all the things that could have been preserved for future generations, reflections of life and humanity from the time, we were looking at a receipt for beer. I'm concerned for the future, when our greatest thinkers and writers may have become obscured by a receipt for beer.

Be an author?

In my current situation, I'm thinking about what I would do with the rest of my life if money weren't a concern. I know, it's the kind of thing you're supposed to figure out when you're in college, and I did that, but it seems like a good exercise to revisit periodically, to see if you're on the right track. Ask yourself "If I didn't have to work for the money, would I do this or find something else to do?"

I keep coming back to the romantic idea of moving to some European city with history deep in the stone buildings, finding an apartment downtown and wandering around the city while I write a bold novel. And then I'll sell it and move somewhere farther east while I write another one. I'll keep going east until I decide it's time to stay in one place. Then I think I want to have a boutique book publishing company. Maybe I could do that the other way around and be a publisher while I travel around, writing. In any case, I still think I could be a writer.

Yes, I realize this doesn't mean I can just decide to be a writer and have that just be my new profession. That reminds me of when Michael Scott declared bankruptcy.



What this means for me right now is that I need to learn significantly more about both professions while I finish my master's degree and find a job in the meantime. Thoughts?

P.S. You know I have a book for sale, right? You can get your very own copy at a little bookstore called Amazon.com.

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some thoughts from today

I was looking at some of the books on my bookshelf today and decided to take To Kill a Mockingbird down and flip through it. I've had that book for years and read it a number of times. It also accompanied my sister to her English class in high school where she had to read it too.

As I flipped through the (clearly) well-loved pages, I started getting excited to talk about it with my kids in 10 or so years. Then I looked at the other books on that particular shelf, all of them exciting that I'll get to share them with my little clones.

That's when I had the realization that I'd been kind of looking for. Every time I've gone through a job search, and this is probably true for most people, I think a little bit harder about what I'm passionate about. What kind of work would get me out of bed in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep? What do I feel passionate about to the point where I would actually try to convince someone who didn't like it that it's wonderful? I feel that way about books. I have very few emotional connections with things, but books are one of the things I'm most passionate about.

I know some people say it's a dying industry, replacing these piles of paper and ink with digital text files you can read on a low-power device that'll hold thousands of books. Amazon even announced that they've started selling more Kindle versions of books than they have physical books. I don't think books are going away any time soon. No one has the same emotional connection to a digital file as they have for a physical object. Pictures of your family seem more real when they're printed on glossy paper than they do on a computer screen. Don't they? People have no compulsion about deleting old MP3 files but we hang on to the old LPs we have because by touching them, seeing them on the shelf, we reconnect with that person we were and the people we were with when we put those records on the turntable years ago. Never mind that you don't have a turntable anymore or that you have a digital version of the album. The same thing goes for books. By thumbing through the pages, you remember the journey you emotionally went on as you smell the same pages and feel the paper in your fingers. You see the notes you wrote in the margins, the highlights you made years ago and smile at the things you thought were so important. It's like a flash of vacation pictures from the trip where you floated on the Mississippi River with Huck and Tom in an instant.

The other reason I don't think physical books are going away is that there's a status attached with having lots of books. Some people pay big money to have libraries full of matching, leather-bound volumes just for the symbol of having lots of fancy books. So what if my shelves are full of paperbacks that I've had to masking tape back together? It doesn't change the fact that there are books on shelves. What's better, I've actually read mine. In any case, there's a social currency in having lots of books and I don't think that's going to change soon either. It's much more difficult to show off your collection of digital texts when you have people come over to your house. You can't have your digital copy of Ulysses staring at people from the shelf in the corner while they admire your Ayn Rand collection of text files.

I'm realizing that I should probably be looking for something having to do with books, since they affect me so much. And apparently Kanye says he does just fine without them. Exasperating.

Consistency

I'm finding it difficult to write in this blog consistently, but that doesn't mean that I'll stop trying. I console myself with the thought that about three people read this blog and I'm writing it primarily for myself anyway. I feel like Alice, who gives herself very good advice that she doesn't follow.

The last little while, I've made a couple of decisions about the way I want to live my life. I'm making a concerted effort to stay engaged in the conversation with people I like instead of spending all my time with the totally cool electronic gadgets I have. I try to remember that the gadgets can wait and people may not. Besides, I don't want to turn into one of those people who, like many of the younger generation, don't know how to interact with people in a way that doesn't involve a cell phone or a computer. There's something to be said for that face-to-face conversation. It's so much more complete.

The other related decision I've made is that I want to regularly spend time outside so that I'm not one of these pasty white guys who spends all his time inside with his electronic toys. Besides, I want to make sure I don't forget how to do all those nifty outdoorsy things I spent
years learning and honing.

So why am I telling you all this? If you want to be different or make some changes, start now. Know that you won't be perfect at it, but keep at it because something's better than nothing.

Who do you write for?

So this last few days, I've been thinking about voice and thinking about what my voice is when I write and who I tend to write for. Everyone's got an ideal reader, a person we're trying to please when we write. Kurt Vonnegut talks about this in one of his books, although I don't remember which one it is off the top of my head. He wrote for his sister. I can rule that one out because my sisters aren't huge into reading. That, and I don't care what they think of my writing.

Joseph Williams seems to write for himself, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think he sounds like a fun person to meet at a party. So I may write for myself. I know I did in high school, but that may have changed. Maybe my problem of feeling a little lost could have something to do with the fact that I haven't written anything of consequential length that I've enjoyed. I started writing something and worked on it for months, but it was unfocused and I didn't like it anymore, so I stopped and started working on something else.

It's been suggested that my writing tends to be very intense and I probably burn out trying to prolong the intensity I've set up. That could very well be true. I think that another part of the difficulty is that I keep trying to make something powerful and literary when I'm not that kind of person who can punch gaping holes in your brain by sheer force of research and verbiage (which my writing hero does). I feel like my voice is more like Vonnegut's: hands in pockets, shrugging and shuffling around almost idly. But under the unassuming exterior, there's a wry, sharp view of things that aren't usually asked because they're taken for granted. Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout
character was a caricature of himself, a disregarded figure who made wild penetrating cuts in the world view of any of the few people who read Trout's work.

While Kilgore Trout usually threw out absolutely batty scenarios to comment in things, I feel like my method would be more like making some unusual but fitting connection so that we can all point and laugh at it. Kind of like the article on Wired today about how Microsoft-Yahoo!-Facebook is like being back in high school. That's the kind of thing I'd do. So I'm still trying to figure out my voice and who I write for. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

The Unabomber

So a couple of years ago, I decided to read the Unabomber's manifesto. I don't remember why, maybe because I like the emotional connection I feel with the word 'manifesto'. It's got that sense of containing radical thought that's probably well-considered, but still rough, meaning that others can come later to refine aspects of it themselves. I'll blame all those literary theory classes I took in college for making me not afraid of reading radical thoughts and finding strong and weak points. But I digress. You've probably gathered I do that frequently.

Anyway, Unabomber manifesto. While a lot of the process and background leading to his argument didn't fit with my experience and realistic predictions, he made a couple of useful points, which I think fit fairly closely to those made by the Transcendentalist writers. Kaczynski and Thoreau had very similar approaches to life: simple and self-reliant.

They both ask the same question, which is one I'm frequently considering. Am I being a capable individual today or am I just a cog in the machine, a mass-producible, fully interchangeable part of the machine?

Most days, I don't even think about it, but when I do, I'm frequently feeling more like a cog in the machine. Unsurprising, since if I felt otherwise, I probably wouldn't be asking the question.

I'm writing this on the bus and there's a guy sitting across from me just grinning like an idiot. I know that just because he's smiling doesn't mean he's dumb. I'd cut the guy some slack if he were reading a book or listening to something on headphones or even talking on his phone. But he's not. He's just sitting there, goofy, vacant smile all the way across his face.

I wonder what people on the bus think of me. I'm sure there's someone like me, taking character notes on the same busses I'm on, and I wonder if I'm any kind of interesting character to them. I try to be fairly low-key, but I'd be curious what kind of a personality I exude.

I'm going to end heee because the guy across from me became the guy next to me and I don't want him to think I was being mean.

Busy busy

I'm currently sitting in a commencement ceremony for a school I was part of in college, before I switched to the monstrous horde of people who studies English. Maybe it's just me being sentimental or snotty (my money would be on the second option, but they're both possible), but I seem to remember the opening remarks for the humanities college as being funnier, more candid and more fluid than the comments in this college of sciences.

We'll get back to that topic a little later, but let's take a short detour for a moment. I want to take a moment to talk about college for some of you who may be in it or thinking about college for your near future. I have had so many experiences recently that have reaffirmed for me that you should do what you love rather than what will make you more money right out of school. Don't get me wrong, it's important to earn enough to live on and pay off your schooling, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is to enjoy what you do. I felt like I fit in so much better as an English student than I did as a physics student. And this event is another affirmation of that for me.

So let's go back to the section before on why it's not surprising that the speeches in the humanities school were more engaging. When you spend all of your time answering the question "so what?", all of your statements have a purpose based on answering that question. Scientists, on the other hand, are concerned with collecting all the information they can, sifting out what seems most relevant, and drawing the most probable conclusions based on the information at hand. Both approaches are important in their own realms, but when one of the fields is more involved in the less tangible points, the finer points of the human experience, those points seem more relatable. They tend to hit people 'where they live'.

Putting those points together in a way that constantly emphasizes how that applies to us has more impact than a catalog of important things.

Again, this is nothing against scientists and mathematicians. I was one and am close friends with others; I'm just saying that the specialties fit differently and have different skills, making one of them better suited to make speeches more widely applicable. I'm going to end this here and enjoy the rest of the ceremony.

The end

I'm sitting at my desk, contemplating the lyrics to The Doors' song "The End".

I realize that there are a couple of things about that statement that point out just how odd I am. First of all, I like The Doors, who are not particularly well-known for appealing to the general masses, but which of my favorites are? Then there's the fact that I'm sitting at my desk, contemplating lyrics. Put those two things together and prepare yourself for a strange trip. Even if you don't like The Doors, this'll be an interesting point, I promise.

Alright, so the song starts with this section:

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end, my only friend
The end of our elaborate plans
The end of everything that stands
The end

What I'm contemplating here is the difference in meaning, but remaining truth in the words if you just grouped them in a different way. The way that Jim Morrison sings them points out the ambiguity in the line breaks. If you haven't heard the song, it sounds kind of like this:

This is the end, beautiful friend
This is the end,
my only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans . . .

The line "my only friend, the end" is the one that's really got me thinking. It could be taken to be a very dark line, especially with the later part of the song with the killer who puts his boots on and then takes a walk through the house. Against the obvious approach to take the whole song as a single text to gather information on the theme and the tone of the song, I want to take a very focused look at this single section as if it were isolated from the rest of the song.

Since life is a constantly-changing stream of events, there's always an end around the corner and a corresponding beginning of something else. I know what you're thinking and I'll totally admit to being an optimist. I think I've even heard the term 'Pollyanna' used in reference to me.

Lately, things have been pretty rough, but in the very recent past, it's starting to look up. For me, then, saying that my only friend is the end is not a cry of desperation or some dark, depressed declaration. I feel like it's more a statement that change is coming, leading to a new beginning. A fresh start.

Now I'll put the question to you for your own introspection. What is coming to an end in your life? An end to putting off writing someone a note about how much you care? Are you going to quit smoking or put an end to the frozen meals you just heat up? There's a new beginning behind each of those ends and I'm sure you can find something else to change. This is your big chance! You can pick whatever you want to change rather than just waiting for life to roll the dice and pick your change for you.

"I'm waiting for the universe to provide a path . . ."

Many of you reading this blog (that would be, what? 3 people?) know that one of my favorite TV shows is Arrested Development. For the benefit of those of you who may not be as familiar with the show as you probably should be, I'll summarize one of the characters so you don't miss out on what this post is about.

Tobias Fünke stops working as a psychiatrist to become an actor. A bad actor. In a family meeting to figure out how to make them seem like less of a disaster, the family's publicist says that he needs to give up the ridiculous quest to become an actor and get his medical license back. Tobias says, "I'm just waiting for the universe to give me a sign", at which point, Michael drops airplane tickets in Tobias' lap so he can appeal his suspension from medical practice in Boston. Tobias says, "Any sign." He totally missed the sign that didn't match with the one he was looking for.

I'm afraid I may not notice a sign like that in my quest to be more employed than I currently am. You'll let me know if I miss it, won't you?

But while we're on the subject, Saturday was interesting for me. I dropped off the girls and thought I'd like to go somewhere and write. So I drove around, stopping at places I thought would have internet access. I didn't feel like paying for it and I didn't feel like jumping through a bunch of hoops to log in, so I drove back to the mall to wait. And then I felt really stupid.

Since when does writing require an internet connection? Or even electricity?

I pulled out my notebook and pen and took some notes on what I saw at the mall. There was a girl in full ballet gear, walking slowly around the mall to practice her deportment. Sparkly costume, slippers, tights, hair in a bun, arms and feet in position. The whole 9 yards. Brave kid and mean teacher. That's what I thought about that. Had it been less obvious what I was doing, I would have taken a picture of it for you, gentle reader. (I always thought that was an obnoxious phrase to read. I don't like to think of myself as a gentle reader. I like to imagine that I'm mentally tearing through the book, but whatever. It was from a different time.)

And there was a couple who looked like they belonged more at an airport or a train station than the mall. Matching outfits, matching fanny packs and baseball caps, matching rolling suitcases, matching Walkman cassette players. It was a little disorienting, remembering I was at the mall, not an airport terminal and that it was actually 2008 instead of 1992. With the ubiquity of iPods and other mp3 players, it's totally anachronous to see someone walking around with even a portable CD player. And those aren't that old, comparatively, to say nothing of seeing someone walk around with a tape player. Anyway, those were just a couple of the interesting people I saw.

I've noticed that I don't usually take notes on those people who are trying to get noticed. For example, the kids who hang around Hot Topic with their spikes and black makeup don't get a second glance from me. I'm more interested with the people who are the real nonconformists. The people who look like they could blend right in if they didn't wear matching t-shirts and cargo pants to the mall, dragging their luggage behind them. The people who've just got that one thing that obviously sets them apart just a little bit and they don't fit in with the group of people who think they're different, when they are just part of another big group of people who wear black makeup and spiked belts and dog collars. The real nonconformists make more interesting characters because they're more likely to have some hidden talent or secret to keep than others. Of course, there could be some great secrets in anyone. That's what makes it so much fun to learn about other people.

In the salon

I'm writing this in the salon, which is kind of fun. I love haircut day!

But today has felt like kind of like a waste. I haven't done much.

Which is how I feel about this blog post so far. It's not revealing or even interesting, I don't think. Probably because I haven't been able to just sit and write it. I haven't been in a coherent frame of mind, since I've been at the salon, crawling the mall, and then at a restaurant during the course of the last few sentences. The next blog post will be more useful, I think. I hope.

Bring it on

I know that all one of you reading this blog are feeling left out since I haven't written in a few days. But I've been busy working on things. Looking for more writing work, working on a book with my brother, watching the NCAA basketball finals. Man, what a good game that was!

So currently, I'm sitting at my desk, listening to Mott the Hoople, working on some website content and thinking about the jobs I've applied for so far. It's a strange group of seemingly writing-oriented jobs, but who knows? Kind of like when you post a job and start interviewing, it's always interesting to see what kinds of people show up. Kind of like taking the train to my office; there are always interesting people on public transit. Even the normal ones seem interesting. I like to look at them through my mirrored sunglasses and imagine what kind of person they are. There's no way I know for sure, and I don't pretend that I'm right about it, but it's fun to imagine the things they're afraid of, what they hide from everyone else.

Back to the topic of thinking about the jobs I've applied for so far, I'm consoling myself thinking about how most of my favorite writers had strange jobs initially as well. That puts me in good company, the way I see it. Besides, it gives a more real-life perspective than sitting in your apartment and just dreaming things up. Like Marx did. While I don't typically consider myself a people person, I like studying people. I find them interesting from a safe distance, which means a distance at which I can instantly disconnect myself from the relationship when I want to. I'm very particular when it comes to people I actually enjoy spending time with. At least, that seems to be true.

You know, I think that one of these days, I should use my nifty phone and post a little photo tour of my trip to the office and back home. I really enjoy the trip and I think it might be informative. Or at the very least, illustrative. And who knows, maybe I'll be good at capturing things in a different medium than my usual method. You've got to try new things. See what this blog's doing for me?

Doubt

I'm not usually the kind to start second-guessing myself, but I've been pulled into a realm of self-doubt the last couple of days.

Do I have an overinflated sense of my abilities? Why does everyone around me seem so much more competent at what they do than I feel? Am I a writer, or am I a guy who's just literate and I need to quit kidding myself and cultivate a skill that's actually in demand? I mean, the market for people who have a skewed view of reality can't be a very large one. Especially the market for the kind of completely silly I tend to lean towards.

Anyway, I had a strange dream last night that I was at a park. Just a park with a playground and one of those pavilion things where people have little parties, like I did for my birthday for years. So there I was, having fun at the park, when the biggest fire engine drove up. It was huge. And a very shiny white. My friend John decided that he was going to open up the opaque cover over the driver's side of the windshield and drive the fire truck around the block while he held onto the front of it. Hanging onto the front, steering by reaching in through the windshield and turning the wheel. How he controlled the speed, I don't know, but this is a dream; just go with it. He took off, backing it up out of its parking space and then going for a drive around the block, all while hanging onto the front of the enormous fire truck.

The truck was an impervious white plastic, with locking covers that flipped up over the windows to protect the truck in particularly scary fires. And there was a lot of chrome. Chrome flames on the side. I know, chrome flames on a fire truck, but there they were. And they were beautiful. I don't know what that has to do with anything. I just felt like writing that down.

Long day

So today's going to be a long day at the office. We've got some people coming in so we can gauge the interest in a class on business writing. I won't get home until the time when I usually sit on the couch with my wife and we either read books or watch DVDs of one of our favorite TV comedies. While I'm excited about the prospect of teaching writing, I'm sad that it's at the expense of quality time at home. The price we pay, right?

Here's the kind of writing I envision taking up the introspective parts of this blog:

• kind of confessional, like Anne Sexton, who I think was hot. There's just something about crazy women that sucks men in like a tractor beam. The downside to me being all confessional is that there probably isn't anything juicy. But I don't plan on hiding things, which will be a rare thing for me. While I'm on the subject, what is it with people sharing things online that they wouldn't dare go to a party, stand on the table, and declare to everyone at the party? And yet, in essence, it's the same freaking thing! I realize the ridiculousness of me knocking that and then fully planning on declaring everything myself.
  
• self-focused, but not to the same degree as Marcel Proust. I do have other things to do besides sit here and write everything that comes into my head. But I want to get as much of it down as I can while I'm sitting here. And as someone with a healthy (perhaps unhealthily high) regard for himself, I have no problem talking about myself.
• as honest as possible. I get tired of couching things in glossy terms, like a Potemkin village, when things aren't as great as I'm describing. I don't expect to have to spare anyone's feelings, so I'm not going to. Having said that, I'm not going to go out of my way to write in order to offend someone. That's not who I am.

Think of this kind of like my diary. I'm writing it for me and you can stumble on it and read it if you want, get your voyeuristic little thrill out of poring over my pages and realize that your life isn't really that boring after all.

Do I really need this kind of explanation? Seriously, most authors just start with a story. Whatever. I've already written it and don't feel like deleting it all. Besides, it would also violate my rules. Maybe that's why I have them. As a reminder to leave it, since I have a tendency to edit and rewrite everything as I go. I've got to get a draft out and then go back to it. Which applies more to the book I want to write than to this blog.

I wonder if anyone besides my wife will read this. And if they don't, so what?

The Journey Begins

You're here and I'm here, so let's get started with introductions.

I'm Rob and I am, at this very moment, an underemployed writer, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone. "A writer looking for work?" and this is where you would fake an expression of astonishment at the prospect. But we'll get to that in just a little bit.

If you're reading this, you're either related to me, stalking me, looking for something else on the internet and are now lost, or you've stumbled onto this out of sheer boredom. Whatever the reason is, you're welcome to stay as long as you want.

But what I'm doing here, and the reason for this blog is that I wanted to have a place where I could work out my problems, which I do best in my writing. My personal journals are full of days where I was working through something I thought was rough. I'm not necessarily an organized person*, so I get things onto paper, where I can sift through the words later. My friend thinks best while he talks through them, which makes for very long conversations when he's stressed about something.

*When I lived in Ukraine, I got called "a miracle in feathers" on a regular basis. Apparently, that's the kind of forgetful person who has to write everything down or it's just gone. Like me.

In addition to soul-searching, this blog is intended to be a place where I can practice writing things that I enjoy writing. I get tired of writing the same boring technical documents after a little while and I've got ideas I want to work out. Again, with words. But I'm planning on writing some fictional something, which I'll do to some extent right before your very eyes. I think it'll be fun and, I'm hoping, informative for someone interested in what an underemployed writer does in their scads of free time.