Blogging habits

Every now and then I look at some random blogs, by hitting the "Next Blog" link in the top-right of every blogger.com blog. Here's a few generalities I'm led to:

- teenagers are likely to change the template of their blog into some crazy uninviting mess and to write pointlessy about the minutiae of their day

- college age people write some interesting personal blogs, because they're both intelligent and unedited

- a lot of older people, "grown-ups" if you will, write on a very narrow range of topics, and many have been blogging obsessively about politics lately (I'm not the only one) even when no one is reading them, judging by the lack of comments

- lots of people write things witty and smart (though not necessarily wise)

- lots of people spend lots of time writing lots of stuff that no one else reads

This leads me to the question of what kind of blog I've got here and what am I trying to accomplish. My main purpose is to journal ad hoc thoughts in a looser writing-style than I'm used to, for practice. Most of my writing for many years now has been dry, technical "condensations" of philosophical material I've been reading. (To learn a book, don't read what is written, write down what is meant. Related to that, I once asked Dr. Binswanger about my idea to teach philosophy in order to learn it better, so that I would be better able to write good philosophy books later. His response was: you don't learn by teaching, you learn by writing. That helped me put the idea of becoming a philosophy professor to rest.) Here I can practice having a less formal writing voice, even experimenting with different styles in different posts, while capturing thoughts which aren't necessarily related to exactly what I'm currently studying. My "Less Hair Day" post a few days ago was the first time I let the writing get a little silly. I think it made better reading for the hapless stranger, but actually I'm not very interested in delving into that style very much. I'm silly enough at home, with Amy and Eli. Writing's when I like to pull it together and accomplish something, figure out what I really know versus what I just tell myself.