Why I Think I Am Sufficiently Interesting to Start a Blog
Reasons I am starting a blog:
1) I think I am endlessly fascinating. Come on, you know that deep down inside we all think that :) There has to be a reason there are now millions of blogs floating around the internet - right? Right???
2) I really stink at replying to personal e-mails, so when people complain they haven't heard from me for a while, now I can say "well, you should have read my blog!" Essentially, I view blogging is a built-in excuse for laziness in this respect.
3) I got my feet wet being the primary blogger on the oXyGEN site, the college and careers group website I ran for my church in Hamilton, for the past couple of years and found that I really enjoyed spouting off my opinions and/or highlighting interesting things I read which I think are important to think about. Since I thought it would be weird to keep posting there while I am not actually in the same country, it was time to start a new blog. Plus, I was always conscious on a church blog to bite my tongue about politics and such things which didn't have some sort of "edifying" aspect for the group as a whole. I'm looking forward to expanding my commentary topics on this blog - get ready for some politics, some baseball, some curling, some cool (?) science, and some relatively boring "look at what I did!" stuff.
4) As most of you know, I will be living south of the border for the next couple of years as I do my post-doc at MIT. So, not only is this a good way to keep in touch with everybody but also share with you some of the interesting features about living in a "foreign" country (as foreign as Cambridge, MA is to Canada, which admittedly is not really too much).
I should explain the name I chose for this blog too. I have been told that I frequently use what could be termed "odd" phrases over the course of conversation. "This is true" is one, "Oh joy" is another, and "There is that" (emphasis on the italicized is) is yet another. I thought "There is that" was the perfect name given the "multi-disciplinary" (academic code word for "rambling and refusing to actually choose a particular topic") nature of this blog. Plus, unlike one of the aforementioned phrases, I have never gotten yelled at for using "There is that" in an "insensitive" context (don't ask, long story :)
Anyway, hope you enjoy it!
