I've decided to go with this "conversation with the mirror" for the time being. To figure out how to connect with others, I'd have to read the directions--and I just can't bring myself to do it. I have now spent the last three days procrastinating because, having saved up so much stuff to talk about, I'll need to learn advanced blogging skills to bring my 'vision' (hallucination?) to the Web. This is a sure route to iniquity....ok, maybe not iniquity but certainly obscurity. At least if I'm talking to myself out loud, some other falling tree might bump into me and then there would be an audience of two for the crash. As of now, the minute odds of such an occurrence are plenty for me.

It has occurred to me over the past 24 hours that you can't really enter a conversation if noone knows you're there (the social equivalent of "if a tree falls in the forest and noone sees or hears it......."?). So, what to do now? I have noticed that many bloggers are highly self-disclosing. Indeed, this is one of the things that makes their blogs such compelling reading. Wow. I don't know if I can do that. (I'm even shy online--great.). Other bloggers have incredibly well informed, pithy thoughts on technology. I certainly have plenty of thoughts, but are they pithy enough? (Oh great, I'm insecure online too). In short, I've brought myself with me to my blog...to which I say, again, oh great.

Note to self: READ THE DIRECTIONS! I wrote a quite lovely post last night, my second, and woosh--off it went into the ether (no, not the ethernet--if I'd done that it wouldn't be gone forever). Since I've been contemplating this for oh, maybe 4 years--even before blogs were invented--I've saved up a lot of material. I could write all day if I didn't have this silly day job.

Outstanding quote from one of the best books ever written, The Confederacy of Dunces (by John Kennedy O'Toole): "The Gyre had widened; The Great Chain of Being had snapped like so many paper clips strung together by some drooling idiot; death, destruction, anarchy, progress, ambition, and self improvement were to be Piers' new fate. And a vicious fate it was to be: now he was faced with the perversion of having to GO TO WORK."

Good morning! This is the beginning of my first day as a blogger. I'm excited, nervous, and most of all thrilled that I am no longer an admiring lurker on my favorite blogs. I've decided to take the plunge and join the conversation.