A Well-Rounded Blog

I’ve looked at my blog as a whole on occasion and contemplated the subject matter of my posts over a longer period. What I’ve written on a running basis has touched on politics and current events, but it hasn’t been introduced as a ‘breaking news, you saw it here first’ format, nor have I focused very much on talking about myself personally, or singular topics like relationships, work, college, ‘religion,’ etc. It’s neat how I’ve managed to give most subjects of relevance to my life a fair shake, not harping too singlemindedly on one thing to the exclusion of others. That is an encouraging sign that I’m succeeding in my goal for the blog, as I laid out in my first post: that I wasn’t going to write about one particular theme, but that I was going to write from one particular perspective—namely, my own, the only one I can know fully, after all. This way, I can spontaneously choose to talk about whatever happens to spur my creative interest at any given moment. More to a practical point, by not locking myself in to a theme related to current events, my blogging doesn’t go off the rails when I’m away for too long to write about major news topics of relevance. I can ignore them if I’m late to the draw, and let online writers who actually really do a good job of covering breaking news handle it. If I write about it at all, it should be to reflect on it, not just to repeat what others have said. That would make it boring. And that’s not how people work in real life, after all. I read a short article by David Brooks that came in my mother’s Reader’s Digest subscription (originally posted in the NYT), where the final paragraph stood out to me. I think he might be glossing over a few subjects and inflating the importance of others, but I think he has the right sense, and so I’ll offer an excerpted transcript of his view as my send-off to finish up this post.

“I figure that unless you are in the business of politics, covering it or columnizing about it, politics should take up maybe a tenth corner of a good citizen’s mind. The rest should be philosophy, friendship, romance, family, culture, and fun. I wish our talk-show culture reflected that balance and that the emotional register around politics were more in keeping with its low but steady nature.” ~ David Brooks

~ Rak Chazak