Religious Wedding

Two of our friends from high school got married yesterday. Their wedding was a very Christian wedding, in a church, with lots of hymns and prayers. During one of the Bible readings, from Ephesians, it occured to me that while there's a lot of wisdom in the bible that everyone could benefit from hearing, it can be very diffucult for non-christians to extract this wisdom because it's sandwiched between lines and lines of Jesus Speak.

Letting go of Undergrad

I've returned from San Diego and I learned that there are several social dance events happening in the next week. I could go to all of them, if it was my top priority. I could go and have fun, and I am used to always going to the social dance events that I can go to, if homework or lab work or dinner with friends is not in the way. But now that I've moved up to San Francisco it's a more significant committment to go to Jammix or Friday night waltz, and therefore I have to think harder about how it's going to affect Robert too, and not just me. That makes it a little bit harder--part of me really wants to go to these dances, part of me thinks I should stay home and spend time with Robert, and part of me wonders if I really want to spend an evening dancing with random people I don't know. And these parts of me aren't mutually exclusive.

I realized just today, although this is obvious, that there are plenty of places to go dancing in San Francisco, and I just need to find them. It's just that finding them, and then convincing Robert that we should go check them out (or maybe I'm projecting--maybe the effort to go check them out is hard for me)--isn't trivial. But it should be fun.

Travel Guide Books

Ever since I saw them in use, I've been vaguely averse to guidebooks. They basically tell you the "insider scoop" on what's worth seeing in a place, what restaurants are worth eating at, and what to expect and how to enjoy a place best. The compelling argument for them is that they keep you from wasting your time on flashy but bad tourist attrations. My parents just went to Spain a few months ago and complained that the food there is bad. Had they had one of these guide books from Fodor's or Frommer's, then they might have been able to find high quality restaurants.

I believe at this point I'm "arguing with myself," in the words of my latest history TA.

Ok, so having presented the arguments against my poit, I will now argue my point. The thing I don't like about guide books is that one of the things that appeals to me about traveling, in theory mostly but in practice too, is that I can discover things for myself--things like how yucky the water is in Mission Bay park and how long it takes to walk to Balboa Park from downtown. With a guidebook, it almost seems like part of the fun is gone, because then all theres left for me to do is arrive at point A, "enjoy it", leave, arrive at point B, etc etc. But maybe not having a guide book means that you're not using all the information available to you, and maybe that is also undesireable.

Here commences my Blog

Here I am, under the granite staircase of the San Diego convention center, starting a new blog on a black MacBook with TI calculator keys. Why am I doing this? And Why do I need to ask myself Why I'm doing this?

For one, livejournal has gotten kind of annoying. I've historically used to it to vent about things that have pissed me off. It has been the forum of much angst and much drama. While I have undoubtedly fond memories associated with that drama, I no longer want to write about things that foster that kind of drama. Also, livejournal makes it very difficult to navigate past entries, and thus makes it hard to go back and find a specific entry that I wrote years ago. It seems that blogspot offers better navigation of past entries. And it's also prettier.

And then, why do I really want a blog? Is it because I'm so vain that I think the world is interested in what I have to say? Maybe. I'm still insecure about putting my thoughts out there in the world, about presuming that someone would care about them. I don't think I'm any less insecure about this than I was when I started my livejournal. But the world doesn't have to care. That's what's beautiful about the internet. And I like to write. At my college graduation, the speaker said that the point of including arts curricula in schools wasn't to make more artists, it was to make complete human beings. The world doesn't need more artists, but the world does need complete human beings. The internet doesn't need more bloggers, and the world doesn't need more writers, but I need to write, and memory on blogger's server is apparently free to me.

I think lots of people are willing to exhibit their lives. Justin TV comes to mind (http://www.justin.tv/ --it's the "lifecast of a dudes life"). Art mirrors life, and in books and TV shows and movies we often identify things with our lives, but this lifecast isn't an art--it's just life, practically unfiltered. I'm not interested in getting into a debate about the meaning of art. The point is that there's nothing artificial about a lifecast. And in the same way a blog is just the unfolding of a life. Lots of famous peoples' diaries have been published after they become famous. With blogs, we don't know who will become famous and who won't, but we get to read the unfoldings of these lives anyway.