Am I revising the two papers that I'm supposed to be revising over break? Am I working on the two new seminar papers I have due in a month? Am I even reading for the class I have the day spring break is over? NO. I'm seeing if I like this blogging gig or not. I'm not sure I do - it's an odd mix of public and private. Like a zen koan, or a public radio station announcement - you happen to be passing by the station and you hear "you're listening to WUNC", and you think, "actually I'm not listening. I hit the scan button and there you were." Then you think, "wouldn't he feel silly saying that if he knew that I wasn't really listening?" And then you realize that, if you hadn't been listening, you wouldn't have heard him say that. And you also realize that if a tree fell in the forest with no one to hear, it wouldn't make a noise. (I'm a committed post-structuralist, you see.)

Blogs are like that, too. I'm writing as if to an audience, yet I assume that no one will be reading. However, the possibility of readership certainly motivates me to write more clearly, more thoughtfully, more elegantly than I do in my private journals. (Actually, my private journals are so horribly scrawled that they're nearly unreadable - and frankly, I find them boring. Perhaps the possibility of an audience is necessary to the act of writing.)

There! All full up of self-indulgent blather - just what a blog post should be.