1st Entry

Considering the fact that I try to be on the bleeding edge of technology whenever possible, I'm surprised it's taken me this long to start a blog.

If you know me well, it's especially surprising that I never started writing a blog before now for three reasons:

1. I'm a pretty introspective guy (If I do say so myself) and I tend to have strong opinions on certain subjects,
2. I like to write. Usually way more than is necessary. And I agonize over even the simplest email, because I hate sending things out until they "feel right".
3. I can't remember crap, so if I don't write it down, it's gone.

I finally decided to start this blog because there have been times when I've gone back and read old emails (or if you go *way* back to old high school notebooks or letters) and for some strange reason, which I don't think is related to vanity or anything like that, I actually LIKE reading things I've written in the past. And I wish I had more old stuff to read, but alas - most of it is gone. So a blog might be just the ticket - kind of a safety deposit box for thoughts. Plus there are times when I just feel the need to rant, and while ranting to yourself is a bit pointless, ranting on a blog seems like it *might* at least get out to someone else, who will either share the rant or dispute it. Either way, it seems like it would be more satisfying to rant on a blog than in my head.

Since this represents my "introductory" blog entry, maybe I should write a bit about myself. I'll leave out all of the normal "who I am" stuff, because I want this blog to be completely based on the text here on the blog - the intellectual and creative aspects of who I am, and I want to use it to attempt to communicate my values as a human being. The "who I am" should build itself up over time. Plus, I fear that having too much information about "who someone is", such as what they do for work, what they do on weekends, etc, can cause people to pre-judge, and that then causes people to approach what is written with less of an open mind, because they believe they can already picture who is behind the virtual pen.

But I will say that I'm a happy guy with an awesome girlfriend, and two fanastic kids and I love the three of them very much. Many of the hardest decisions I make are related to them in some way or another - I think until you only really get to know "who you are" and what you're made of once you have people who depend on you and love you, and count on you to make the right decisions and keep everything together. Then your decisions have a much more critical impact than when you're just deciding for yourself. When you're alone, you have to weigh your decisions against many different factors, but when you're a "family man", that weight gets multiplied and there is inertia in different directions that affects your decision making process, making it much more difficult.

Now where do these random thoughts and ideas come from? This may be considered by some as Too Much Information (TMI), but it's the truth. I'm the kind of person who has interesting ideas (at least I think they're interesting!) each morning in the shower. There's something about being in the shower in the morning that makes it ideal for deep thought. Maybe it's the isolation - being surrounded by white noise, and following a routine that I follow exactly every morning of my life means that my unconscious mind and muscle memory can take over 100% and leave extra cycles for my conscious mind to use to come up with random thoughts. Or maybe it's that first thing in the morning, after having my brain "defragmented" overnight, it's easier to make connections than it is at any other time of the day. Either way, I find that I often solve problems, make important decisions, or make sense of overwhelming input in the shower.

Also, I suspect some portion of the reason some people write their thoughts down in blogs is because it's therapeutic, to help them collect and process their thoughts into some semblance of order. And once they're done they can read it over and skip all the intervening mental steps and achieve the sort of clarity that you get when you think about purely black and white issues, even if this particular issue isn't that simple. Seeing something written down, especially by you, gives something more weight and clarity in a way.

Anyway, I think that's enough of an intro post. I know last week I had a rant that was just burning to get written down, but as I said, my memory sucks and I've already forgotten what it was. But now that this post is out of the way, I have a place to put future ideas where they can be safe and sound. :-)