Blogger's Ambitions... again.

Two years have passed since my last - and only - book review blog. It would seem that I only became a blogger for a day. It is nice to note that my blog has been trolled by an online advertisement. At least it has been viewed!

In two years much has happened, including two kids, another degree and I have become a runner. My resolve to blog has, believe it or not, stayed the same. My blog suffered an all-too-common death: bring back cogito ergo blogo, Ben! The real problem I encountered was a fear of posting unrefined thoughts. I suppose I anticipated some readership (despite rational thoughts that assured me otherwise) and dreaded being scorned. As my good friend Ben pointed out in a comment to my aforementioned solitary post, I am a nerd. I used footnotes in my blog [1]. I suppose I cannot help but want to treat a blog like a publication. After all, prospective employers could google my name, find my blog and decide to not hire me due to my proclivity to avoid contractions, the improper use of participles, incorrect grammar (do I use the Oxford comma or not?) or my tendency to write with dictionary in hand (correction: dictionary-as-a-built-in-function-of-my-mac's-dashboard-available-with-the-convenience-of-pushing-F12) in order to use the most accurate and technically correct words possible (to be clear, this is not the same as writing with a thesaraus in order to find big words; I like to pretend that I already know such words and merely required a dictionary to confirm their precision). In the alternative, they may not hire me because I am a raving lunatic. Admittedly, I am also afraid of silly errors - hence my writing blogs (generally) in a word processor prior to posting. While I will not deny that I also wish to avoid sounding like an uninformed and uncritical simpleton, I fear more the thought of one day reading previous posts and being incredulous to my previous state of mind. I blame Gary Dann for this, having years ago advised me against writing in my books (which, admittedly, I continue to do) given that I was likely to revisit some of the books in the future and be dismayed at the incompetence of the previous reader who had the audacity to mark up the text!

In spite of my apprehensions, and my apparent inability to produce, I've decided once again to embark on a blogging journey. The impetus for this decision is largely due to an old friend I have recently become acquainted with again. To my delight, he and I share many of the same views. He also has a blog, which I would encourage others to visit: http://aaronbonham.blogspot.com/. His blog made me reflect on my blog and lo and behold, it continued to exist. In addition, I have actually been reading books. Shocking, but a requisite activity to blogging about books is reading books. While I have always intended to read books, as of late the reading of books has been actualized. Finally, I have a thesis to write. One may be inclined to think that spending time on a blog would inhibit the progress of said thesis - a sentiment that will hopefully be proven false - but I am confident that the mere exercise of writing, in whatever manner, will stimulate the creative juices and help me overcome my current impasse. Besides, I have every intention to write posts about thesis-related materials; consider my blogs preliminary drafts.

If I were to be honest, unless I actively pursue a readership, consisting mainly of my likeminded friends, nobody (perhaps with the exception of advertisers!) is likely to read any of this. To those of you that have responded to my appeal for readership, I thank you.

So, I embark on the second (fatal?) attempt at blogging. To get over the intial qualms of unrefined posts I have not drafted this post in a word processor and I didn't use spell check. I have just now used a contraction and will proceed to make a silly error somewhere in text that follows: believe me, its there. If my blogger's ambition does not fail me, you will hear from me soon.

ja.

[1] Who is the bigger nerd now? The one including footnotes, or the one referring to them?