Also in the news: This is my 101st post using Movable Type. It is a day to celebrate my migration from Blogger! Yay!
What? You wanted valuable news? How about the discovery of a 182-carat diamond--bigger than a computer mouse and worth millions?
Oddly enough, I found about that via the radio before I found out about it via the internet. Usually the traditional media has more lag time than that.
Speaking of time, it's one o'clock in the morning. You know how most people have a 24 hour "sleep cycle"? I think God gave me a 24.5 hour one, because I stay up about half an hour later every night. That needs to stop, and not only because it means my posts get more meandering and less focused as I stay up into the wee hours of the morning. It makes things difficult Sunday mornings when I need to get up at 7:30 to get ready for church. I guess I ought to try to stay synchronized with the rest of the world.
So, in keeping with that goal, I'm going to bed. I'll try to talk about something important later.
For example, I might write about, "How do we decide what is important?" Well, obviously, stuff that impacts us personally ranks at the top. For example, if I wrote "Your hair is on fire," you might touch the top of your head just to make sure. Because you (if you're normal) like to keep your head as unburnt as possible. Or if I told you that the nation's food supply was about to be poisoned by terrorists, that would matter to you.
Further, if an event affects a group that you are a member of, then it stands a pretty good chance of mattering to you. Say, for example, a suitcase nuke goes off in NYC. That matters to me, even though it doesn't directly affect me in the same way that getting poisoned does, because it means that members of my group--the country--are being harmed. Or, say, Congress passes a Canada-style ban on "hate speech" that makes preaching against homosexuality illegal. That affects me because it affects another group that I'm a member of--Christianity.
Is there any other critera for something being important to us? As Machiavelli said, "When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content." I think we can safely add "nor that of their friends" to his statement. Do we care about things that don't affect us in the slightest degree?
Of course we do. Why else do we read Lileks or other personal blogs? Why is that? Other bloggers' personal lives don't affect me at all, but yet I'll read a select handful of bloggers' entries about their lives.
I'm thinking that there are three main reasons to read such personal, and frankly, unimportant (to most people) notes: A) Amusement, always a valuable commodity, opiate of the masses, etc.; B) inspiration, by which I mean both those things encourage us and those things that make us say "Aww....." in a "that's cute" manner; and C)enlightenment, for the occasional nugget of wisdom or the practice in the art of debate.
It's now 1:30. I think this thoughtline has run its course. Congratulations for finishing that; something tells me I'll wake up in the morning and read the above, and regret boring everyone with it.
But that's the great thing about the internet; you are under no obligation to read everything, or even to pretend to care. If this post bores you, you can skip to the next one, or go to some other blog for a while until I come up with something good again. I wish that it worked like that in say, classroom situations. I hate it, I hate it when a teacher wastes my time in endless review (for the slower members of the class), or follows some irrelevant, uninteresting rabbit trail, or even teaches something that's in the curriculum that's utterly irrelevant to life (such as post-modernist English literature). I'm paying you to teach me, so teach me something valuable for crying out loud.
"The worst thing a teacher can do is waste me time, for in so doing he commits a miniature murder." I wrote that down during an accounting lecture once. It's a bit melodramatic, but if Franklin's adage of "Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that's the stuff life is made of," is true, then so my frustrated sentence from accounting.
Kind of ironic that I mention that when I'm wasting my sleep time writing this post. Does that mean I'm committing miniature suicide?
1:44. Bedtime. Seriously. Must put down laptop.
Posted by Blog Jones at July 20, 2004 01:45 AM
| Category: Personal