Still Here

Hello!

This is Nobody In Particular, a weblog that I started back in late 2006. It came out of a nagging desire to be a writer of some sort, coupled with the understanding that I'm a terrible writer. Although this isn't an online diary, it's where I work on things that I've been mulling over in my head; I write them out because it's more organized than simply thinking about things.

The original goal was to be something of an Explainer about the United States, but penned by just another random American, rather than a political scientist or other professional commenter. I've had the opportunity to travel outside of the country on a couple of occasions, and been close to people from overseas, and fielding their questions on why things here work (and people here behave) in certain ways clued me into the fact that there were a lot of things about the United States that could do with some explaining. But instead of doing that, I seem to spend a lot of my time here grousing about things that irritate me. I know that I should likely lean into that, given how often I've tried, and failed, to take the blog in a different direction, but I have yet to be at ease with how much of a curmudgeon I can be in public.

Now that another new year is starting, I might try to do something different again. I suspect that the first thing I need to do is find new sources of information. I tend to go to the same sources, like The Atlantic or FiveThirtyEight for information, and I've become familiar with the takes that I'm going to find there. So it's time to broaden my horizons; maybe open a subscription to someplace like The Economist or another offshore news source. We'll see.

But in any event, for all that I don't know that this project is doing anything for me, I'm still invested in it. So I'm going to keep up with it a little longer. Who knows, maybe I'll get it to the twenty-year mark. If nothing else, it helps me to look back at things that I've written before, and see how my thinking as evolved. And there's no better way to understand how one has changed as a person than to have snapshots of the person one was.