How to Dissuade Yourself from Becoming a Blogger

What a buzz all the bloggers are making these days! It seems like just about everybody is pouring their musings into a text box. Are you feeling tempted to start a blog of your own? Here are some ways to bypass the trend.

Steps

1. Find five completely random blogs, and read them daily for a month. After thirty days, you will absolutely dread your self-imposed requirement to read all that dreck. Any blog you create will most likely be on par with what you've been reading. Don't put anyone through that.
2. Consider that your voice, even if it is truly a good one, is a tiny peep against the massive wave of tripe out there. The odds of anyone you don't already know finding your blog are low.
3. Write on a regular basis in Wordpad instead. If that doesn't satisfy your urge, and you feel that you must post your blog online, then you might just be craving attention and validation--which you'll never truly find in a blog. If you give up on your Wordpad journal after about three days, you'll do the same with a blog that just takes up server space.
4. Ask yourself if you really have the time to commit to a blog. What about that treehouse you wanted to build? Or the book you wanted to write? Or the car you wanted to fix up? Or the restaurant you wanted to take your wife to? Or the new career you wanted to pursue? Instead of writing about pretty much nothing, or whining about all the things you wish you were doing instead, start doing something that'd actually be worth writing about. And if it's really worth writing about, you'll be having too much fun doing it to tear yourself away from it.

A couple weeks ago we met my parents half way so that we could visit. It was good times. This was our animal pose (i'm supposed to be cleaning my head, in case that was unclear).

All the craziness over the job has settled, for those of you who don't already know. I'm now officially the Director of the Carey House in Laconia. But, fortune has smiled (or smirked, I should say) upon me, and I was able to keep one course at LCS, which will allow me to stay connected at the school and get some of my pent up teaching out.

I already started teaching my one class, which is called Philosophy II. We'll be reading through Peter Kreeft's The Best Things in Life, as well as Descartes' Discourse on Method, just to name the first couple. I'll be stealing some ideas Shumaker gave me for how to conduct the class. We'll go through Descartes using a method called "microexegisis," which is just a flashy way to say that all of the reading will be done in class, one sentence at a time. This, of course, is not the best way to read a book (which, in terms of philosophy, is to read the whole thing quickly straight through once and then go back and re-read it carefully, looking at each individual part), but will hopefully help the students think through the text with precision. Apparently, Shumaker learned about this method more in detail when he visited Gutenberg College in Oregon last January.