A NOTE ON MY LONG ABSENCE

It’s hard to say what inspires me to write this blog, but obviously whatever I’ve been doing since October isn’t it.  I’ve only written three things in the last eight months, and let’s be honest, that last one was shit.  The one about comets and crap was pretty good though.  Anyway.

I think part of it is that I keep running into these stories that are worth addressing because they’re widespread phenomena that affect thousands if not millions of people and are based entirely on such an atrocious understanding of science in general that I’d describe it as “spit and rainbows,” except for the fact that those two things actually exist and are empirically observable.  But the fact that they’re very heady subjects — coupled with the fact that for some reason people take some of them very personally — means that writing about them requires a considerably larger investment of time and research than, say, pointing out the stupidity of paying twenty thousand dollars for a stainless steel barrel masquerading as a bathtub.  Just looking through my list of source pages right now, I have several current dietary fads that are stupid, several stories about space and/or physics written by people whose only knowledge about space and/or physics comes from reading other articles about space and/or physics written by people who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, and one about how women may or may not be crazy.  There are also some stupid products thrown in.  It’s plenty to work with, but nothing super easy.

Which brings me to the next part of my theory: I’ve been enjoying my life too much.  This seems like a weird problem to have, but I was thinking about it last night and I remembered that in high school, I wrote a lot of poetry, most of which came from a position of being really depressed about stuff.  Most of what I wrote seems pretty laughable, reading it back now, but I could get the creative juices flowing in a heartbeat back in my angsty teen days.  And I think that’s a factor here.  I live in an awesome city, it’s sunny all the time, and it’s hard to muster the motivation to sit down and complain about how stupid everyone is when I can just go for a bike ride instead.  I read a story about a woman who thinks she can eat sunlight and air or someone who thinks they can build an elevator on the moon (both real, both upcoming), and I laugh at it, but I just don’t care enough.  I’m not angry.

Well, that all changed yesterday.  I laid in bed, unable to sleep, watching the bright green numbers on my Nickelodeon alarm clock (yes I do, and yes I am 24) tick from 11:40 to 1:15 before I finally fell asleep, and I got myself good and riled up about a lot of things.  It’s a mix of jealousy and sadness and loneliness and frustration and hopelessness and genuine anger, and the details don’t really matter, especially since most of you don’t know me.

What matters is that I’m a deeply complicated person who has finally, somehow, found the motivation to yell anonymously at morons I read about and then make fun of them for your entertainment.  I can’t promise anything, but to one extent or another, I’m back.  Thanks for bearing with me during the long dark months of silence (unless you live in New Zealand, in which case they were long, very sunny months of silence).

Posts will start up again on Sunday so you have something to read during when football would be happening if the stupid NFL would just institute a 45-week season.