Some Thoughts About this Blog

Hello friends, family, and those who stumble upon this blog:

I figured I would start out with a brief summary about, well, starting this blog. The biggest factor is that I'm really really bad at staying in touch with people. That inability may bring about a misconception: I neither think nor care about a variety of people . This is just untrue- I actually pretty regularly begin emails because I run across something that reminds me about someone that isn't geographically close to me. If you've managed to find this blog, chances are you've been the unknowing addressee (can you call someone an addressee if the email was never sent? Do people ever use the word addressee?) of several of these. Usually I get about halfway through the email before I decide that the person I'm writing (far less eloquent than "addressee") more than likely does not care at all about the thing that I've connected with them, and really it's pretty silly to contact them at all about it. (Of course saying "halfway" is entirely meaningless since I never finish these emails- let halfway mean to you what you will.) "Moreover," I think to myself, "maybe it wasn't (for example) Jim's Aunt who was named Alice at all, but Susie's." So now the article I was intending to send Jim - about how people named Alice are statistically more likely to be run over by stampeding flamingos - will be received with a good deal of confusion, particularly when I title it "Better warn auntie Alice." Now I have not only sent Jim, my dear dear friend, an article that he doesn't care about, I have also revealed my own ignorance about Jim's personal life, thereby confirming that I really don't know Jim at all and never considered him a close friend because I can't even remember that it was Susie's aunt Alice, who I've met 26 times.

Ok, so anyone would be pretty excited about the flamingo story, but you get the idea. I'm hoping the blog will help me nourish ongoing exciting relationships with the various people I've come to know and love. In that regard I strongly encourage comments.

Secondly, I give as a fair warning a summary of the material you will likely find here. I expect much will come from the outlets that I read most frequently; the somewhat liberally minded news blog TPM will be balanced by "Thatcherite" Andrew Sullivan, with healthy doses from the mainstream media (read as NPR and nytimes). I expect there will be occasional forays into philosophical and classical musings (old habits die hard), and maybe, if I do get a job, some thoughts on that. Perhaps the stray thought on Cambridge. Maybe some television (currently the wire) and book reviews. If none of these subjects entertain or interest you, you probably shouldn't waste your time checking this blog, unless, of course, you are simply interested in me. In that case, this is probably a good place to start to find out about what I'm thinking. If you happen to be interested in all these things, and read the above stuff as often as I do, my blog may be superfluous. I encourage you to read anyhow, so that I can feel like I have a community here...

I honestly had no idea that I was so long winded.

An Afterthought: It occurred to me that point number 1 may look like I'm just trying to get out of ever personally contacting friends while pretending to be close to all of them, which was not my intention at all. If I wanted to do that, I would just start using Facebook, ooooohhhh, burn...but seriously. Despite the existence of this blog, I will do my very best (which is frankly not all that good) to send email, make calls, etc.