the meta-post

So, the thing is, I'm not sure why I started this blog, or why I somehow feel like I should blog, or what exactly is the Point of All This. The blogs that I like are those of real-life friends (I should say, for one in particular, those of real-life fiends!) of mine or those that are pretty specifically and intelligently about a particular topic. So, why should anyone read *my* blog? What do I have to say? Why do you care?

Ok, if you're my friend, maybe you care because you care about me. But still, if I go on and on about nothing, even you can get bored, right?

And what do *I* get out of this? It's not like I specifically need a place to put my daily thoughts and activities; I already have that and it's called my journal and I write in it nearly every single goddamn day without missing any days except in cases of extreme trauma or extreme exhaustion. (In the latter cases, I almost always make up for it the following day. In the former case... well, I broke up with him and eventually got over the block, more or less.)

I have considered a few different aims, or themes, or raisin-duh-etres for this blog, as follows:
0) I sort of started this around the time I started thinking more seriously of writing fiction, so I thought maybe this would be a good place to post bits of that and see what y'all thought (see this post, for example.) But I haven't really been doing that, and none of you posted on *that* particular posting anyway.
1) I already post my quick thoughts on each book that I read, elsewhere on the web, and I thought about expanding that a bit, since I also like to learn new vocabulary from what I've read, keep track of what I recommend, remember quotations from the books, etc... but it's not clear that I need a new place to do that, separate from where I already do it, and I'm clearly not up to reproducing the effort in two places, since I often fall behind in the one place...
2) I am a teacher, and I learn a lot from teaching. Sometimes I think my focus here ought to be recording my thoughts about teaching, since there are lots of days that I lose sight of my so-called "teaching philosophy" or days that I'm not the best teacher I can be, and maybe recording my daily ideas/triumphs/failures/illuminations about all that could be helpful to myself for remembering and possibly even helpful to others. Plus my students say damned funny things sometimes and I've considered the latest-best-kid-ism theme.
3) I believe the original or truest definition of the blog thing was not "here are my musings" or "here are my pictures" or "here's my diary" but "here's a link to something I found somewhere else on the web that you should see, and also here's my original and insightful commentary on that thing". So I've considered doing *that*, but who am I kidding? There are umptimillion people doing that better than I could... I hardly even surf!

Basically, so far this blog is still totally unformed and camp is imminent which means either: you won't hear anything from me for the next nine weeks and then I'll start all over or not, OR, this'll continue to be an unfocused mash of all of those things until a particular urge gets stronger and it becomes Something Real. In the meantime, if you *are* reading, I hope you'll comment and let me know what you think, because I am clearly casting about alone here :)

AND: Dude who claims to be the BoMD: reveal thyself! I'm tired of waiting :)