What Mir said.
Occasionally I grow tired of approaching every post to this site as needing to be a subdued philipic against something or other, a pointed stick to poke the government with. Why should I care about the government; can't they care for themselves? The answers are: because I was a Government and Politics major in college and have my head stuffed with pointed stick notions about good government and right rule, and yes, governments do care for themselves - that's the problem. When I try to think of other things to write about I discover the wall.
If you have a blog, it is a known fact that you will invariably hit the wall when it comes to writing interesting entries. Today I ran out of ideas. My past few entries seem like total crap. That's Mir from Dim Sum Diaries. I identify, second, and call for the motion to be voted on. I habitually use the Rss News aggragator that came with this weblog to pull down a fat stack of newspaper stories and such. Then I write about that stuff; its a closed loop. You're often far better off foregoing that, and taking a dive into your blog roll (I don't put web logs in the RSS thing, because I like to see peoples sites - their pictures and colors, setup and so forth). Journalists as a tribe, are bigger navel gazers than web logists will ever be.
It often seems to me that I have plenty of other things to write about, Then when I try to sit and write these things it doesn't happen. I go someplace else and wait for other ideas. Sometimes, I will revisit one of these bypassed ideas, and it will flow out with only the normal effort and pain of writing. When this happens, with the aid of a little introspection, I know it is because I understood it differently the second time. More likely only understood it then. When you find you can't write about something it is because you didn't really understand what was happening in the moment you were trying to describe, or didn't encompass all it truly meant to you. Articulation signifies understanding and nothing else does.
I took an english class once (this was a long time ago). It was a 200 level class, anyone could take those, even GVPT folk. The class was taught by a visiting professor who was on hand to teach a graduate seminar. With the natural grace of the highly educated, she reminded us continually that she put up with our slackjawed stupidity only through computer error, not desire. She was semi famous. She had written a journal article years before which people I knew spoke of in hushed tones. Dancing through the minefields and a book about the settlement of the American Frontier called Lay of the Land Her name was Annette Kolodny. Toward the end of the semester, she called me into her office, and told me that she had to tell me that she considered me functionally illiterate , and further despite that, even more because of it, I needed to learn to think faster on my feet. I've decided to take that under advisement. Just as soon as I teach myself how to use this OPML outliner to write posts.
5:25:41 PM  ;;
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