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First Impressions
What makes me think that I can blog? I am a free thinker—that is to say I think for free; nobody pays me for this work. I am detail oriented—that is to say that I only get the important things wrong; I tend to get the details right. But then again the devil is always in the details, they say. I am bursting with bottled-up self-expression needs—that is to say I have an excess of parenting and nurturing energy. I love language, writing, reading, and text—that is to say I am an unpublished and unpublishable author. What makes me want to blog? Unfortunately, the blogging kind of publishing is the worst form of vanity press. From my vast experience of being a blogger for the most part of two days, I am inclined to conclude that blogging properly done is nothing but ego-driven self-promotion supported by misapplied new technology that isn't even that new. I have the feeling that I just got rolling on writing what I really wanted to write in my blog today, which is to say that I want to draw a water-level mark summarizing my initial views on this activity I have so recently embraced. I hope to be able to revisit this subject periodically with lessons learned, so that’s why I want to record now my baseline. How am I going to avoid ego-driven self-promotion? Very naturally; my ego is such that any form of self-promotion is repugnant to me; in other words, I believe that I am so good that this goodness is self-evident and therefore self-promotion would be just a misguided waste of effort. What if I am not as good as I think I am? This too will become so self-evident that no amount of self-promotion will help. Now that I’ve cleared up what I am not going to do, let me turn to What I intend to do. I have a life-long interest and commitment to the following subjects: 1. Helping my kids (as if they need or want my help) 2. Learning and teaching about 2a. Writing 2b. Linguistics 2c. Chess How does blogging figure in all this? Let’s see: 1. I am always on the lookout for anything helpful or potentially harmful to my kids. I hope to be able to absorb some information along these lines from the Blogosphere, be able to digest it, and then post the digest on my blog. 2a. I need much more discipline for writing until I drop. I hope blogging will sometimes be for me a form of public flogging inflicted for lack of regular writing habits. Fear is still a powerful motivator for me. 2b. I am self-taught in Linguistics and the onion model of the world and its languages makes me cry. I hope to be able to interblog with linguists in all my languages: English, French, Romanian and Russian. From this you may jump to the conclusion that I am multilingual. Far from it. I am afraid I am actually alingual, that is to say I don’t "carry" any language well enough to be a writer in it. 2c. Chess used to be my life and I hope blogging will help me replace one obsession with another. What’s left for me to write about? If whining and self-promotion are out, maybe I should be on loggerheads with other bloggerheads? Nah, I don’t think so, because self-promotion is still repugnant to me and besides, this niche in the Blogosphere is already overpopulated. So am I saying I don’t have strong opinions? I am afraid so. On the other hand Cioran said that “you have strong opinions only if you haven’t studied anything thoroughly”. Oh, so if I am so erudite why don’t I write about what I know? If I were doing here Mathematics, Software slavery, or Chess that would be the right thing to write about, because in those fields people who don’t know what they are talking about are not encouraged to talk about it. As if that ever stopped anybody who cannot shut up. Here, in the field of self-expression, the opposite is the norm. If you already know it what’s the point in saying it? Saying what you know is not exploration and self-expression; it’s just recitation and regurgitation of information nuggets. As you can see by visual examination without a microscope, I am doing a lot of blogging without knowing a lot about what I am doing. I am always impressed by the magnitude of my ignorance. So how am I doing so far? All I know is that I am still alive, which is a temporary condition, with a permanent solution.
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