Five Steps To Better Navel Gazing…
My friend Em has submitted five interview questions to be answered blog fashion. You’ve probably seen this exercise before, perhaps even participated. It is much more personalized, thought provoking, and self revealing than your typical meme. And I must say, Em has done a magnificent job of constructing questions that stretch me. My one hope is that the responses I offer are half as intelligent as the questions.
1. This month is the two year anniversary of your blog. How have your thoughts about blogging changed in that time as you’ve shared your thoughts, read comments, and read other people’s blogs?
2. What do you want people to learn about you from reading your blog?
3. On your “Who? Why?” page, you mention that you’ve always felt you had a book in you and the ability to write it. What would that book be about? Fiction? Non-fiction? If you finally started writing it today, what would it be?
4. One of your earliest One Liners postings featured this quote by Laurence J. Peter… “If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else”. In your childhood dreams, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you know where you were going…or did you end up somewhere else?
5. If you had a time machine and the option of traveling to two different times to live, would you choose 1900…or 2100? And why?
Having never been one to do things like everybody else, because that’s what’s expected, I will not disappoint you this time. I plan to milk this assignment for all it’s worth, stretching it out over days and weeks and months and … well, days anyway. So this time I will tackle the first question.
You know you’re getting old when you forget your own anniversary or birthday. Actually, it occured to me about a month ago that nobodyasked was coming up on its second birthday. I made a mental note of it that promptly got lost in the vast wasteland of my mind. Em was correct. May 7, 2005, saw the inaugural post that rocked the world, a day that shall live in apathy, as I said in the first anniversary post.Since I came here with no set expectations, or at least none that were well defined, a veritable tabula rasa, if you will, then it safe to say that everything I think and feel about blogging today is new and has been wrought by the experience itself. A few of my key thoughts about blogging:
- I wish I had started sooner.
- I wish I had more time to devote to it.
- I feel richer, more alive, more vital, more interested and interesting, from blogging. Really.
- People I meet here can be every bit as fickle and deceitful and selfish as the ones in my non-virtual life.
- Conversely, most are just as real and genuine and interesting and giving and supportive as the friends we have in our daily physical lives.
- I grow by reading other blogs … your blogs. I hope to occasionally return the favor.
- I’ve always had a better than average vocabulary, at least for a country boy from Tennessee. That has been enhanced through both the reading and writing activities that transpire here.
- I believe that dictionary.com and google.com are the greatest achievements and assets of the human family. And chunky chocolate fudge ice cream.
- Blogging is important and becoming moreso as it matures and evolves.
- I believe that the future of personal communications, education, business, perhaps even governmental transactions, will be an extrapolation of some highly evolved superset of what we do here now. We are guinea pigs in a gigantic communications laboratory. Sentient, sagacious guinea pigs who are designing and shaping and modifying the experiment and rebuilding the laboratory on the fly.
I could go on. Some will say I already have. But I believe those points fairly well capsulize my thoughts and perceptions on blogging and how my thinking has evolved and changed over the first two years.
Stay tuned for chapter second of the Interplanetary Navel Gazing Cookbook…
16 Comments so far
A nice start. As you know, I’m fond of this meme, too; it’s good to see you joining in.
I read somewhere not too long ago that the number of blogs that Technorati keeps track of has been level for some months now. I’ve never thought that everyone would start a blog, much less keep it up, but now there are enough of them so that I’m not as hesitant these days to say out loud that I blog, too. Anyway: except for the “Tennessee” part, your list above could be my list of what blogging hath wrought in my life, too.
I look forward to reading your future answers.
For what it’s worth - I do love reading your blog, Winston, even though I don’t leave a lot of comments. (Mainly because I would tend to ramble on for pages, and who needs that in a comment section?) I’m coming up on my second blog anniversary in August, and the thing that surprises me is that I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping up with the thing. I’m glad that you (and I) haven’t fallen by the wayside. Looking forward to how you respond to the rest of the meme.
Ooo…chocolate fudge ice cream really is good! Maybe not quite as good as Chunky Monkey…but close!
What a great beginning. I love your list. Like you, I wish I had started sooner. But just in the short time I’ve been here, I do see a change in how information is shared, how professional development is being done, and many other changes due to blogging.
I look forward to all of your answers!
Nice beginning Winston…and good move. One question at a time…good strategy…pulling us in for several days to see what you have to say.
With something that has become an important part of my life….I wish I had started sooner too. I’ll be coming up on my 2nd anniversary too…in August. Who would have thought that when my daughter, Jory, said one day…”Hey Mom, have you ever heard of a blog?”… it would all have come to this.
Happy Anniversary, Winston. Great post! What amazes me most about the blogging experience is my feelings of genuine affection for some other bloggers. Two years ago, I never would have thought it possible. In any other era, they would be forever strangers. Now they feel like real friends.
Again, Happy #2 and wishing you many, many more.
Okay, I’m smitten with you and this post. (Yes, I wish I had started blogging earlier as well.)
This is great.
Good luck with navel-gazing. Going to look for mine.
WHY do you all wish you had started earlier?
Bonnie, probably for a variety of reasons, but also probably with one common thread: we all feel we have so much to say to ourselves that we realize we’ll never get it all said. If we had started sooner, there might have been a better chance. If/when you start a blog, you will also feel this way. This is a safe forum for talking out loud to ones self without coming under a great deal of medical or legal scrutiny or public ridicule.
Smitten? Newscoma said smitten?
Is that (1) a smallish kitten, (2) a dyslexic spelling of mittens, or (3) a drug induced misspelling of supercalifragilisticexpealidotious?
Winston,
These questions are delicious and I will enjoy reading your responses. I might even blog about them in the future - on those days I need distraction from the work at hand. Happy blog-a-versary. I agree with you that my life is enhanced by the blogging community, and I think you were already interesting when you started out!
Two years! Who saw that coming? Time flies, don’t it? I loved your bullet list and agree with every point.
Keep on blogging.
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