Online and Not.

I'm not much of an online person. I don't like interacting with strangers online, I find the relative anonymity to be off-putting. Like many my age, I jumped onto social media as the train was leaving the station. I was maybe a bit late to Myspace, but I hopped on Facebook as soon as I was able. But as I've grown older my interest and frankly courage to be online has dwindled. I don't use Instagram, I'm a terrible LinkedIn networker, I've quit using my Facebook for anything other than a reference, and, while I recently began tweeting, I'm still rather tentative in terms of engagement.

So why start a blog? Because I enjoy using writing to process my thoughts and feelings. Whether I've just read a book that activates some portion of my mind, or had a conversation that changed my thinking, I like to use written word to process it all. If nothing else, writing it all down lets you look back to thoughts you once had that you maybe no longer think, or have forgotten you once thought. Maybe moreso, writing it down allows for you to revisit the fleeting sense of emotion that you had about one topic or another.

The result here should be a collection or repository of my thoughts and emotions. Some things I plan on posting that I've written in the previous years. Although, I'll be sure to provide some indication of when the post was originally written.

I also plan to bring a couple of projects that I've worked on over the last several years to this blog. For one, I investigated the constitutional convention of 1787 with a mind to our current situation and how we could adapt those lessons. Another long running project that I've kicked around is on legislative visualization. The world is filled with hundreds of legislative assemblies and, to my knowledge, there is no repository of easy visualizations of those assemblies' makeups. I don't have the illusion that I would be able to bring that sort of information overload to a small personal blog, but I can at least present some of the work I've done there. Finally, I've done a fair bit of work (including a master's thesis) on how rhetoric shapes domestic and international security.

Ultimately, I intend to use this blog as a repository and showcase for my collection of half-baked ideas and half-completed projects.

Thanks for coming in today.