Self-Absorbed 100th post!

In November, 2005, there was a graduate student with a dream. His dream was that somewhere, there was a land, a land in which his mind could rove free. Free of the constraints of rational thought, coherence, or clarity. He did not find this land, but he did found this land, and he called it, "The Realm of Pseudo-Profundities." And so should you.

Sometimes, as I look back over these posts, especially the early ones, I have to remind myself that I have never taken illegal substances. I sometimes ponder how my style has changed since this blog's humble beginnings. Shows like The Simpsons or the website Homestarrunner seem to get progressively weirder the longer they continue; in contrast, I feel that my blog has actually moved closer toward normalcy. In my earliest posts, I lovingly crafted weird phraseologies alive with alliterative alley-oopedness; sometimes, I even out-lined a post in advance, such as my pseudo-profanities post. Yet at some point, I realized that all the effort this involved looked like the sort of thing I used to call "work," the very thing which this blog was created to avoid. I think my style has gotten less weird, partly because I've gotten lazier about blogging.

It's interesting to me to see how the subject matter of my blog has evolved. Initially, I envisioned the blog to be aimed at "academics": I was an English graduate student that was going to subvert academia and destroy it from within. But then, a funny thing happened. I started working on writing my Robinson Crusoe dissertation chapter. And months later, I was still working on my Crusoe chapter. My life centered around reading Crusoe-related paraphernalia. Now, since there are only so many blog entries someone can write about Crusoe, I sort of wandered from the academic fold and branched out into other areas, like cat analysis. Even though my blog has always been concerned with religion (such as midrashic angels without noses), I began blogging about Christianity more frequently; part of the reason for this increase is that my blog feed started going to my alma mater, a Christian college, and I thought it might meet readers' interests. Perhaps you have noticed that one of the most striking characteristics of this blog is its narcissistic quality: I blog about strange thoughts that I have, often unconnected to anything going on in the outside world. However, I recently subscribed to daily news updates, so maybe I'll be writing a lot more "news" blog in the next year (such as Barney the dinosaur's legal troubles). Recently, I have also tried to "return to my academic roots" a little bit with the "Expand your Jargon" series. I don't know where the next 100 posts will take me, but hopefully it's at least past the dissertation!