Why Blog?

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology
Greek philosopher in Athens (469 BC - 399 BC)

I'm an analyst. I analyze. Everything. All the time. I analyze my life, my friends, my relationships, my pets, my self. Sometimes it makes my head hurt because I can't stop.

I have been this way as long as I can remember. Needless to say, this was not very popular among the instructors in my rather conservative religious high school. I got a lot of "some things are beyond our understanding" responses (not very satisfying).

It seems to be part of my wiring.
And, unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an on/off switch.

This can be a good thing. For example, it lets me excel at my job (which, not surprisingly, involves data analysis). It also helps me think through the consequences of decisions very quickly and thoroughly. I'm great in emergencies. Unless there is a lot of blood.

Sometimes it is less so. It can make my friends and family slightly insane. And sometimes thinking through all the consequences results in much less interesting decisions.

My favorite kind of conversation is one that focuses on why...why something happened, why someone acts the way they do, why society is the way it is, how things came to be.

Just yesterday a friend and I had a long conversation about why it is that movie stars and rock stars have so much power in our society. (Our conclusion: Biologically speaking, it probably has to do with the fact that they have such widespread facial recognition. And we are "wired" to assume that people in the limelight have power, and are therefore important to us. Goes back to the tribal days.)

These are the kinds of things that occupy an ever-increasing amount of space in my brain. And I thought, just maybe, a blog like this would be a chance to clear some more space up there (because frankly, I'm running out of room to store things like new phone numbers and passwords). And maybe, just maybe, I'll find more crazy people like me who journey along the path of asking why.