Now you're cooking

The blog is now virtually self-contained, subsisting and, really, thriving almost exclusively on its own collective mind-juices. These are mind-juices that are first cooked to perfection in a sultry cauldron of debate.

It's what the GRE folks would call a positive-feedback loop. I write something. Someone responds. It spurs me to write something else, connected but independent of the original post. Someone responds. You see where this is headed, and it's been headed there for about a week now.

The reason I hadn't updated in a week was because I didn't feel I could take the time to comb headlines and whatnot to dredge up interesting minutiae. I've got graduate programs to not get into. Now, though, the comments are doing the dredging for me. This is good.

Since my little break, the most interesting and insightful [and factual, data-supported] arguments and observations have been in the comments. This is necessary and I'm glad it's happening. Despite my suffocating narcissism, I bore myself. The things I blog about are swimming around in my head all the time already, writing them down doesn't mystically invest them with some new gravity.

What it does seem to do is spur conversation, objection and agreement. That's the best and most vital part of this blogging thing [refusing to refer to it as the blogosphere], it's the decentralized exchange of ideas.

That kind of exchange, more than slogging through readings, more than listening to professors chirp and coo, was the thing that made college mean something. It was in discussions that I found novelty and real expression. I'm glad it's starting up again here.

This is beginning to become the thing I had hoped it would be back in July.

I still hate the goddamned title.