Teachable

From time to time, I find myself going back through old posts. Usually because I'm going to talk about something that I've spoken of before, and either want to link to an older post, or find a quote or something that I included in one. A habit of mine in such situations is to correct typographical errors that I'd made in the initial writing. Spelling tends not to be a problem. My browser has a spell-checker built in, and so errors are flagged as I make them (and sometimes, due to the limitations of the built-in dictionary, when I don't).

I tend to think of the posts of this blog in the present-tense; that is to say, my initial impulse, on finding an error is not to remind myself that I made it years ago, but to be disappointed in the fact that writing this blog has not, in fact, turned the me of today into the more capable and rapid writer that I wanted to be.

Part of this, of course, is simply one of the pitfalls of being a writer through trial an error. And so maybe I should stop doing that. Blogging has Caught On, and that means that one can take classes on how to do it better. So maybe I should take one. Or three. Other than the cash outlay, it can't hurt. And maybe it will move me towards the sense of mastery of the subject that I seek. In the meantime, I'm going to keep at it; it's become something of a compulsion, I think. But I do enjoy it, even if I don't devote as much time to it as I used to.

As I've grown older, and mellowed, I've found that I devote less time to exploring the world around me, and maybe that's the problem. When I first had this idea, some 20+ years ago, I'd originally thought of doing an advice column, or something similar. I'd also toyed with making the space a general Explainer on the United States (hence the subtitle "just another random American"). But a lot of these posts are simply my observations of the world around me. So maybe I need to be a better observer, to be a better writer.