Blogging about Blogging

It's Friday and I don't feel like working, so I read this article in the New York Times about a blogger's online life. It's an interesting story of a woman who made much of her personal life visible to strangers via her blog/job and felt more than a small amount of regret for it. It got me thinking as to why I blog. 

I blog because it's halfway between keeping a journal and making faces in the mirror. There was a time when I thought I could capture something essential about myself in a blog so that a future me could objectively examine the me who was posting. I don't think I've quite done that. I censor myself for a number of reasons. Further, self-examination pays diminishing returns after a while. When I was a kid I decided I would catalog all the thoughts in my head. As I began to comprehend the difficulty of the task, the thoughts that needed to be cataloged were mostly thoughts about cataloging thoughts, and then thoughts about the nature of self referential thoughts, and then ...

Fastchance has turned out to be a place for me to try out different narratives for my life, and in a way to pick out the crucial aspects of my life. It is easy to see that meeting and marrying my wife has been an important part of the story of my life, but grad school for example, is not at all clear. Fifteen years from now, I may look back and say, "Grad school was walking through a door into freedom." I may look back and say, "I didn't have to do that." Having a record of these attempted stories, however imperfect, is of value. 

So why not keep a journal? Writing a journal entry doesn't require telling a story. A journal entry doesn't require analysis and can become nothing more than data collection.

Time runs short. I must meet some friends at a local pub before Banach-Tarski hour for pints of beer ends.