Always Sticking my Ego in my Mouth...

I have realized an unpleasant truth about myself (as if that were a rare find) and I am gonna record it here.

I started this blog under the pretense that it was going to be a way for me to journal* my thoughts, sort of like a diary crossed with a day planner. There is a romantic attraction to the idea of journaling. I envision a lone thinker out on a sunwashed hill, sitting with his back against a huge, gently shushing tree, staring off into the blue and occasionally bending over a book of unlined paper and writing something deep and transcendent in slanted, effortless cursive script. With a quill pen. That, I tell myself, is journaling: recording the fleeting glimpses of the profound so that they can be mulled over and reflected on later.

So that was my proclaimed intent when I started this blog. To journal, just like I described above. Except for the sunny hilltop and the tree. And the quill pen and the book of unlined paper. And maybe the deep, transcendent thought. Well, I was gonna come close. Darn tootin'.

What I have done instead is write feverish little diatribes and giddy, humourous articles in the hopes of wowing and wooing an audience. Which has not come, by the way. I am SUCH an arrogant twit sometimes. I glibly told people, when I was starting this blog, that I didn't journal as such because journaling was the written equivalent of talking to one's self. To me, the act of writing, of communicating, is about speaking to other people. About sharing thoughts with someone more than my future self. The arrogance is that I think (no, in my selfish, gaudy, prideful little heart I KNOW) that I have all these amazingly pithy and thought-provoking ideas to share with the world at large. All I needed was ... A Voice! A forum, a stage from which to speak. And the blog, I just knew, was going to be it!

Well crap.

That didn't happen. I am one more voice in the increasingly cacophonous** mish-mash of this brave new (and noisy) world. One more thing for most people to tune out. And well they should! I'm not saying anything particularly new or groundbreaking, I have to admit. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said better or quicker before. (am I?) I'm just here to journal, anyway. Ostensibly.

So here I am, talking to my future self, being a bit of a melodramatic whiner. Hi future self. Recognize me? Did we figure any of this out? Am I a little less arrogant by the time you read this? Did I finish that crazy Basilica 3D animation project that I've been tinkering with and not quite getting around to completing? Tell future wife I said hello. Give future kids a squeeze for me.

See what I mean? This is weird!

So anyway, to prove that I am now writing this just for myself and not for some hopeful and amorphous audience, I will make a list of things I need to do today. This is sure to be very boring. You may as well give up reading this now if you are anyone other than my future self. Go read Bored Housewife's blog. She has an audience and there is the occasional picture. Go on. See ya. All right, anyway, here goes:

1. Finish this blog entry.
2. Think about when I am going to wrap the wife's Christmas presents.
3. Perhaps actually wrap the wife's Christmas presents.
4. Send existing Basilica 3D files to programmer for debugging.
5. Work on subway train model, prepare for merchandising.
6. Email school about times and location of classes, arrange lab fee.
7. Take a nap if the kids will let me.

All right, I think that's it. I'm on the right track, future self. This one's for you.

Because the truth is, writing down everything I have written so far has actually served a purpose for me, even if very few people have read it (and even fewer have benefited from it). As I have written, I have had to examine and arrange these thoughts. Test them in the light of potential critique. And in so doing, I have pinned down a little more securely why I think some of the things I think. Now, when the opportunity arises for me to actually respond to someone who expresses an interest in my opinion on these topics, I will be much better equipped to give that opinion and be confident of it. I suppose that's the real reason I am blogging, the real reason I am keeping on with it.

Even if, in all wretched honesty, it isn't the only reason (sheepish grin).

*which means what, exactly? People talk about this journaling thing all the time, as if they are worried that if they don't cage their thoughts somehow, they will scamper into the brush like field mice. My philosophy has generally been that if a thought or idea doesn't have enough stamina to stick in my head, then it probably wasn't worth writing down anyway. A sort of mental survival of the fittest, no? Now, what was I saying?

** and the award for best use of the word "cacophony" in a blog entry goes to...