Blog style

And in case you couldn't tell, I've decided to keep doing this blog the way I've been doing it, filling it up with the assorted bits and pieces of things I think are interesting.

Partly 'cause it's easier that way, and partly 'cause I'm pretty sure there would be a lot of overlap, and I wouldn't know where to put half the things I write.

As someone wise once said, "reality confounds mutually exclusive classification." (dang, I wish I could remember the source of that line!)

100 Questions

I once did an exercise where I sat down with a notebook and wrote 100 questions (this is before I had kids). The first 20 or so were fairly obvious, but by the time I hit 80 or so, they were definitely in the "outside the box" category. The obligation to come up with 100 led to a more creative & insightful result than if the exercise had been "come up with as many questions as you can."

There's something very stimulating & productive about having a goal, even though 100 is a completely arbitrary number. It could just as well have been 113 or 97.

Same thing with blogging (or any type of writing). If the exercise is "Blog/write every day," at some point, you run out of obvious things to say. Some bloggers go the easy "here's what I had for breakfast" route, or "wow, it's cold here," or some such. I'm sure some of my previous 240 posts are in that category, despite myself.

But a committment to post something to the blog each day at least offers the potential to push us beyond the ordinary, into the realm of the surprise.