I am an artiste.

Creative impulses are very odd things. Not that I'm saying I'm artistic or talented in any really tangible way (I'm surrounded by too many people with awesome drawing/designing/creating/musical skills to consider myself anything like an artist), but I do get the occasional urge to write out my thoughts in a semi-coherent manner for the world to peruse. Hence, this blog.

But it turns out the world's perusal is not such a big deal after all. Y'see, I wrote a huge long post a couple of days ago. It was about how people are trying to acheive perfection by imposing straight lines and geometric shapes on nature, which is inherently irregularly-shaped and random. And how nature was showing us that we can't ever acheive perfection, and that so-called imperfections are actually what make us the unique and beautiful snowflakes that we are.

So I wrote the post, and then promptly lost it in the wide Sargasso Sea of cyberspace. Due to my inability to remember that I have dial-up now, I tried to post it to an internet I was not actually connected to.

But here's the funny thing -- I didn't care. I should have been mad that no one got to ever read my thological, philosophical treatise on nature not being straight, but I wasn't. As far as my brain was concerned, I'd expressed my thoughts in language, and so I was done. There was no real need for other people to read my work -- I'd explained my thoughts to myself, and so I was done. Publishing it was secondary.

It's very odd. This experience has made me think that really, what I'm after when I communicate (either through speech or essays or in this blog) is to clarify my ideas for myself. Not to convince other people, but simply to organize my jumbled thoughts into a coherent whole which I can then file away in my brain. Maybe that's why I like talking to other people about 'deep' things (religion, politics, human nature, etc) so much. Not because I want to hear what they think, but because I want to hear what I think.

After all, I often have my best ideas while in the middle of writing or talking.

It's kind of a disturbing thought, actually. Is my interest in writing and talking really that masturbatory? Am I just after my own personal pleasure -- don't I care about learning from/about others?

But perhaps these are slightly hysterical conclusions to draw from one misdirected blog post. I'll think about it some more, and will welcome comments from you, my faithful reader (all three of you).