Nobody In Particular

The original plan was for this to be an "about me" post. Despite the fact that one of my stated goals for Nobody in Particular was that it wasn't going to be about me, this is post #2,000, and so I figured that I'd make an exception for the occasion. And then decided against it, because I still consider myself to be a boring and unremarkable person, and I can't really imagine what anyone would want to know about me. I'm not really that interesting.

But back in 2006, when I started this endeavor, I'd noted that "interesting things happen around me, and in the United States, and I hope to make this into a somewhat interesting place to read about them." I don't know how good a job I've done at that. My ex-girlfriend put her finger on it, I think, when she noted that I tend to use this space to complain about the world, and despite a stated desire on my part to give the blog a more positive tone, I still tend to post about things that strike me as wonky. When I'm playing the part of "Guy With a Camera," it tends to be about interesting things, so the Photography posts don't strike me as having the same negativity. Outside of that, however, things can seem one-note at times.

When I started this, part of the reason behind it was to become a better writer, in a few different ways; to be better able to organize my thoughts and to work on the skill of translating them into a written format. I'm also a terrible typist, and considering the amount of time my job has me writing e-mails or working on documents, weblogging seemed like a good way to hone those skills. I'm not sure that it's been working, despite my having been at it for more than a decade now.

Instead, Nobody In Particular has become about me understanding the world around me; making sense of it and placing it into a perspective that allows me to better relate to it. It's not so much a venue for "thinking out loud," as it were, but one for solidifying those thoughts and being able to come back to them later. I'm something of a forgetful person; going back through my old hardcopy "diary," I was impressed at the number of times I'd had the same epiphany, and decided to write it down. I want to avoid doing the same here, but I have caught myself repeating posts in the past, as I've come across something I've written in the past, cleaned it up and posted it here without realizing that I'd already been through that same exercise.

And I think that I do this because one of my recurring questions about the way that people behave is: "What purpose does this serve?" Because while I understand that people don't do things without having a reason; in a lot of cases, that reason isn't immediately accessible to me. And so I sit down at my keyboard, and I work it out. And I either find and answer or confess to being unable to do so. I should, I think, leave it as a question when I can't sort it out, rather than deciding that some or another action is "a pointless charade that does nothing constructive," as I put it in one of the first time's I used the formulation. (For the same reason, I should also retire the "Rampant Idiocy" label for posts.)

If I could choose literally anything to have as a special ability, while I might consciously be tempted to grab a useful, but low-key, superpower, like walking through walls or something, I think what would best fit with my personality would be the capability to consistently and accurately understand people's motivations; to understand what they think they're accomplishing with something. I don't know that Nobody In Particular will move me closer to that. But I've come to find the work of it worthwhile.