Another Lap

It's another new year. I think I've learned my lesson with resolutions. My goal of being more politically engaged back in 2004 has resulted in a steady stream of fundraising e-mails from all around the country that has yet to dry up, and my gastrointestinal tract still hasn't forgiven me for deciding to go vegetarian for all of January 2019. Other years haven't been much better in that regard.

But still, it's nice to have goals, and so I do want to have one for this year. So maybe I'll just go with something simple, and put some effort into being more helpful. Helping people out with things, even minor ones, can make my whole day, and it's not like I'm attempting to make the whole world, or even the whole of Washington State, a better place.

It's easy to be negative; after all, I've become quite good at it, for all that it's gotten me. So why not instead do a little work to spread some positivity? The world is still likely to suck for a lot of people, but I don't have to be an active agent of that. Besides, as often as I say that I should be the change I want to see in the world, I may as well put my money where my mouth is.

The other thing that I'd like to do this year is try my hand at podcasting. That's a much longer shot, I have no real idea on what all that entails, but it can't hurt to learn, right? (I feel like I've just tempted fate with that last bit... we'll see how hard it bites me.) 

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.

XV

Today marks fifteen years since I started this little project, and to celebrate, I'm going to take a break from it. Mainly to give myself some time to look around and find new things to read, and thus, to write about. Current events have become something of a drag recently, with the same general stories circulating around. So I'm going to find something new, then pick up again. I'll likely have one more post before the end of the year, so that there are the requisite 13, but I don't expect to really come back to this before January. So it won't be a long hiatus, but it will be some time away nonetheless.

In any event, thank you for reading.

XIV

Hello. One of the general rules of Nobody in Particular is that it's not about me, directly. That is, this isn't an online diary. I'm a fairly boring person, and no-one wants to read about me. That said, I'm Aaron, and I live in the suburbs of Seattle, Washington... on the off chance that the pictures of the Space Needle and Seattle at night didn't clue you in.

I started this blog fourteen years ago, more or less today. The date's the same, in any event, but it was late on a Friday, back then. This was one of those things that had been kicking around in my brain for a few years before I actually got around to doing it. The original concept was going to be called The Help Files; I'd envisioned it as an online advice column. But I never did anything with the concept. A trip to London in 2004 gave me another idea: explaining the United States to people outside of it. President George W. Bush had just been elected to a second term, and people I met on the Tube or on the bus had questions. And I enjoyed answering them, so I thought it might make for a good topic. But I hadn't thought it out all that well... like where my initial set of questions was going to come from.

In any event, I kept talking about it, until one day, someone told me to shut up, and just do it. And so I did. The original concept, as laid out in the original post, was to talk about the interesting things that went on around me. But that would require me to get out and around more than I do, so I often simply post about things that I encounter in the news or in other locations around the Web. And that's really about it. Welcome to the page, and feel free to leave a comment, if you'd like. If you have a question about something, feel free to ask, if it's a topic, it might be interesting to run it down and write something up on it. The initial goal had been weekly updates, which quickly changed to thirteen posts per month. (That being the number of posts that went up in the first full calendar month of the blog.) I figured that I would have burned out by now, but I should hit 2,500 posts by spring.

Overall, Nobody In Particular is disconnected from the rest of the "blogosphere;" it's not part of any larger circle of blogs, and it doesn't have one of the popular themes. I'm not a "daddy blogger" or a food blogger or a travel blogger or anything like that. Whatever crosses my mind becomes the topic of the day. A lot of times it's something that grates on me in some way or another; I'm something of a critic of the world at large.

But, before I forget. Thank you very much for reading. If you're a regular, I appreciate you making the time to check in, and if you're new, welcome. I hope that you find it interesting. And yes, I do still use the term "weblog" from time to time.

Day One

So today is the first day of 2020. And for a lot of people, it's also the first day of a new decade. This has lead to a number of discussions of when a decade actually begins and ends. The common argument is that since there is no Year 0 A.D., the first year was 1, and so the end of the first decade was 10 A.D. Carry that forward for 2000+ years, and decades officially end on years ending in "0." And for that sets of ten that start with "1" would logically end in "10," that outlook makes sense, but this isn't the way that people normally use numbers. When people talk about the 1970s, for instance, they don't commonly mean the period from 1 January 1971 to 31 December 1980. Likewise, one's "Twenties" last from the point they turn 20 to their 30th birthday.

So, mathematics and year numbering aside, I'm siding with the idea that today is the last day of the decade. It fits in with how people use language, and in the end, it doesn't make a difference. There are people who find the perennial debate fun, and more power to them. But having come over to the idea of meeting people where they live, rather than expecting them to travel, Happy New Decade it is.

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.

Decade

Hello!

Today marks ten years since I started writing Nobody In Particular. It is not, I think, what I first intended it to be. My original goal was to create something of an insider's guide to my little portion of the United States, hence the "Just Another Random American" subtitle. But I don't know that I really understand the United States, the Pacific Northwest or suburban Seattle any more than the average person, and while I have a habit of overanalyzing things, society is not really one of them.

A few years into it, my now ex-girlfriend noted that Nobody In Particular is where I complain about the world. The world and I don't always get along well, and when I don't have someone nearby who is willing to listen to me rant about it, I'd sometimes write it out instead, and post it here. Which, I believe doesn't do anyone any good. So, for decade two, I think I'm going to try to take a different tack. Less "current events that annoy me" and more "things that have legitimately caught my interest."

The world in an interesting place, and I think that I should pay more attention to the parts of it that are right in front of my nose. So we'll try it, and see how it works.

And A Year Begins Again

Hello, everyone.

Happy New Year!

I'm still working on whether or not I should have a New Year's Resolution this time around. The last time I had one, and I carried it out, was in 2004. I resolved to be less of a bystander in politics - I was going to go out there and become involved. It ended badly. (Although I did have the chance to speak, face to face, with both of our Senators, for the low, low, price of $250. Which was, really, a bargain.) It turns out that there is a reason why so few people are active in one party or the other. One is drunk on a constant stream of whine, and the other throws back Haterade like it was water. And no matter which side you happen to be on, it's hard to escape the idea that they're trying to convince you to drink the Kool-aid*.

Of course, maybe I'm better off simply not playing the New Year's Resolution game. It's hardly been shown to be a good model for improving one's life. But I can see the appeal. If we're going to make an arbitrary date in the beginning of Winter the start of a new year (had it been left up to me, I would have chosen the Spring Equinox), it makes as good a marker as any from which to measure progress. And there is a part of me that wants to do something different this year. I've been doing too many things that haven't been working in the way that I want them to. Time to give it a rest, and find a different path.

Although one thing I want to do this year, which I know is going to get me into trouble (because I never learn), is find a Cause. I've added a link to my list of weblogs for Photography is Not A Crime, over on Pixiq. But I like to take pictures, so it makes a certain amount of sense that I'd be in favor of not having Big Brother looking to have me re-educated every time I haul out my Nikon. So I've been feeling an itch to find a cause to support that has nothing to do with me. And I mean really support - as in actively do something to advance, and not just pretend that Awareness equals Action - slacktivism won't get anything done. Something that doesn't directly benefit me, my friends or my family. This one, I know, is going to be tricky - activists give me a pain. Which, perhaps, is the single best reason for doing it. The fact that someone gets on your last nerve doesn't mean that what they're doing isn't important. I've also never really been much of an activist; passion and I aren't exactly tight. Maybe it's time I worked to change that.

Or maybe I'll just work to make it though another year with my sanity intact and my cynicism in check. That always turns out to be more work than it has any right to be.

As for you, enjoy it. Years are never as long as they're supposed to be. If you're going to cram in all the good times, good works and just plain good life that you're entitled to before the end of 2011, you'd better get started.

* Yes, I know it wasn't actually Kool-aid specifically that Jim Jones and his followers used to poison themselves and each other.

Playing Catch-Up

Sorry... It's been a while since I posted - I've been busy working on a professional certification, to increase my "marketability." (I'm wondering if a new package design or flashy television commercials would also help.) Anyway, now that that's done, I have time to get back to random bloviation.

Nobody In Particular, Blogspot style...

No longer content with being behind the times, I've decided that it might be worthwhile to try my hand a weblogging. We'll see if it manages to make me into a rightful resident of the 21st century, or simply marks me as another wannabe n00b. The goal is to update the blog no less than once a week, and to avoid talking about myself - afterall, I'm not a particularly interesting person. But 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'm also conducting somewhat of an experiment. I also have a webspace on Windows Live, and we'll see if one of them is more to my liking than the other. Most of my web-savvy friends are betting heavily on Blogspot, but we'll have to see.

Now all I have to do is get a cellular telephone and an iPod, and I can claim to be hip and with it.