The feline apartment tour



OK. I made a pictures page. Like anyone is gonna want to look.



And worse yet I posted pictures of my CATS. Not that they aren't cute cats. But I am officially entering Personal Web Page Hell. And if you're reading this I'm taking you there with me.



Why does Johnny blog anyway? It feels kind of like the overnight radio days when I would stay up all night playing dusty old country songs. At 4 AM every old country song sounds like The Great Speckled Bird, and you just start to wonder if ANYONE is listening.



Since I can't write anything longer than a post-it note these days this medium seems to work. It also has the advantage of not taking two years to write. The instant gratification of blogging beats the endless slog of academia. I decided I didn't want to spend my life becoming the world's expert on the head of a pin, pushing myself to write a journal article that only six experts in my field would - or could - read.



Didn't want to do that. Wanted to teach.



I go back and look at papers I wrote during that great expensive dead-end era of grad school. I remember writing the papers. I remember reading the books I cited. But I literally can't understand what I wrote. My brain is in a completely different condition now. It's like a long distance runner and a weightlifter. Both are highly trained and conditioned athletes, but the nature of the conditioning - strength vs. endurance - is not comparable.



I never really dropped out. I just took a semester off to work on a campaign.



I'm now finishing my 23rd consecutive semester off. (Of course, I still have the lifestyle of a grad student...)



With politics, you know what you're accomplishing. It has a final score like a ball game. You win. You lose. You try again. Of course, the stakes are real, but that makes it more engaging, and gives you reason to spend your life on it. It matters to everyone, whether they admit it or not, and you don't gather dust in the bound periodicals section. Why play academic politics when you can play REAL politics?



Now whether or not blogging about it - and remember, this started with pictures of my cats - is doing anyone any good, you decide.

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I'm still trying to get used to the new Blogger interface. The handydandy Blog This! shortcut seems to be not working for me tonight. I DO see that Blogger has added a comments feature. I'll have to see if I like it better than HaloScan's one that I was using. I, uh, guess you can comment on that, huh.