Thursday, December 30, 2010

Hi I'm...

     I've been thinking about “questions”, which is entirely different that answering questions. I answer a million questions everyday but how often do we stop and actually think about the question? To use a metaphor, questions are food. I can either wolf it down and binge on the banquet in front of me or I can enjoy it, cutting small pieces savoring it's subtle flavors and the delicate textures as my tongue moves it over every taste bud in my mouth, letting the sensations become vision as they dance light across the back of my closed eyes.
    Ooh, writing this on an empty stomach was not a good idea.
    One of the questions I've been dining on has been feeding man for centuries. You can't count the tomes that have been written in an attempt to answer it. I keep coming across this query with many of my friends, but I've met older people as well who struggle to come up with a reasonable answer.
    Who am I?
    Philosophy has tried to answer. Most popularly known is Descartes who reasoned, “I think therefore I am.” I don't dismiss the power of the mind, but in this answer I sense a short coming.
    The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, added, “You are what you do, not what you say you'll do.” My grandparents generation, called the Greatest Generation, believed this. A man worked his land, his job, and was thankful for the toil. And when the sun sets? Who am I when I cease to labor?
     Heritage used to play a major role in identity. An introduction was a name followed by a long list of 'son of's. But what do we do with the broken families of today? The Fatherless? The abandoned and the lost?
     Marketing is more than willing to supply you with an answer, a stylized, modernized, and capitalized answer. You are what you wear. You need this to be. Show who you are with this App.
     All of this adds up to little more than questions. I walk away from each answer feeling hungry, sensing some truth, but the aftertastes of the question lingers on un-matched and un-satisfied.
     I agree with Deitrich Bonhoeffer when he tasted this same question.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Blogging: File 13

       I've never Blogged.  I've never read blogs.  The whole genre, or fad as some say, was thoughtlessly tossed in to File 13.
       My high school French teacher, Mr. Johnson, used File 13.  He was old school.  Firm discipline and high expectations.  He never settled for less than a student could give and always encouraged them to push beyond what they saw as their limits.  Think Mr. Feeney from Boy Meets World.  Whenever an office Memo about dress-code or a new policy that had nothing to do with education would arrive, Mr. Johnson would hold them up and praise their historical import, their lasting impact on his life, how they would change our lives forever.  There was only one place to preserve such important documentation, File 13.  With great ceremony, he would take the hallowed document tear it into tiny pieces and violently throw it into File 13, the garbage can.
        Blogs belong in File 13.  They're just a waste of other peoples time.  No added value to life.  Most of the ones I've seen are emotional vomit, a fit of ranting in which the author heaves up the thoughts of their mind, like so much bile.
        Or so I thought.  I was recently challenged to start blogging as a means of sharing my discoveries with others, a chance to steer them to content that could affect them for the better.  First I apologize to all of those blogs and bloggers that I carelessly tossed into File 13.  Secondly, I seek to make a amends by creating this blog as a means of pointing people to content such as yours.  So if anyone comes across content that they feel is worthwhile leave a comment and I'll do what I can to connect others to you.

        This blog will exist for 3 purposes:
        #1 - To ask difficult questions and anecdotally share attempts at answering them.
        #2 - To share discoveries related to the technical arts and their impact on individuals.
        #3 - To encourage others to thoughtfully engage media in this new era.

       Hopefully if I am able to stick to these three criteria, it will give you a good reason to read me and save me the fate of File 13.