note on site content

In a little over a week it'll be one year since I started blogging, which is just about the point in a blogger’s "career" when one of two things usually occurs: the blogger realizes that his/her blog is no longer interesting (or never was) and decides to stop blogging, or the blogger realizes the success of his/her blog and pledges to continue entertaining his/her readers. And while my blog falls in the former category*, with the exception of an interesting entry on rare occasion, I nevertheless plan to continue blogging (for now at least). This is partly because my blog was not designed to entertain (that is, anyone aside from myself and a few friends), but mostly serves as a means of fulfilling my compulsion to record nonsense related to my life in some form or another. Over the years I’ve adopted different means of fulfilling this need. In high school, I kept a journal and collected newspaper/magazine clippings in a folder. When I started college, I wrote letters/faxes to my friends and also began documenting my life in digital form. I soon did away with my word document and instead barraged BPS with a steady stream of emails (I have over 400 pages of saved email correspondence, in addition to the hundreds of saved emails to other acquaintances). Then last summer, when BPS began dating her beloved, she took to completely ignoring my emails. And instead of falling prey to getting annoyed or insulted by my friend’s loss of interest in my daily collection of nonsense, I succumbed to starting a blog, something that I felt signaled that I had hit the peak of nerdom. But geeky or not, I find that blogging, supplemented by less frequent emails, fulfills my basic need to compile and write general nonsense, and also allows my friends (or anyone else) to read my nonsense at their leisure - or not. And to the random reader who happens upon this blog and is astounded by how boring my life seems, my life is not as lame as it may appear (but pretty close), since I do refrain from posting things that are either of personal nature or that would get me in trouble if the wrong person read this blog.

Anyway, someday I hope to find better uses of my time…But for now, blogging sure beats reading about dynamic programming.

*During an Imposter Syndrome workshop that I attended a few months ago at MIT, Dr. Valerie Young commented that if you give a talk/presentation or the like and someone in your audience approaches you and praises your talk, to brush off their praise, or worse yet, to deny that your talk had any value, is downright insulting to the complimenter. So my apologies to any readers I might be offending by disparaging my blog and in effect saying that you must have poor taste if you are reading this lame nonsense.