Saturday morning post

Real early... ( Caterpillar will be happy to note that I'm sure ).

Winter finally decided to show up. Temps in the teens the last couple of days. I've had to leave the pseud overcoat on the hanger and break out the two layer Marmot. Anyway, it's Saturday morning, and being in a contemplative mood I think what this blog needs is some long posts with some actual thought put into them, to go with all the short posts & links to random stuff that's been the staple so far. So I'm setting out to write such a post, but I don't really have any specific thoughts about anything in particular right now.

So let me just expound on the long post theme a little bit. One thing that always bothered me about our group interaction was the shallowness of the conversation - not in the sense that we were talking only about shallow or silly things - but there was rarely the patience to speak at length about anything or the patience to hear someone out on most things. No "long form" conversation. A related thing that also bugged me is that most of the conversation revolved round a fairly small set of topics, we all know what those are.

Well, our group interaction is now history. We will keep in touch to varying degrees over the phone or email threads etc., which is fine. But I would like this blog to also be a medium where people can express themselves at length about things they feel strongly about, find interesting, want to rant about etc. It's not therapy or revealing everything about yourself. But writing a long post about something forces people to make partially formed thoughts & opinions coherent. To borrow a phrase from my advisor, it's good for the soul. And it's good from a reader's perspective as well to hear what your friends actually think about stuff. It adds depth to the group interaction.

Living in a time and place where most of our mental faculties are directed towards work related things and most social interaction is fairly superficial, I think it's a very healthy exercise.

So I encourage you all to ramble about stuff in posts, respond in comments, all of that.


ps - just want to make one thing more specific - I'm not advocating writing long posts about the minutia of our daily lives. It's a big world out there, so get your head out of your ass once in a while and think global. And write down what you think.