Thursday, March 23, 2006

Eponymous

I have been thinking about starting a blog for some time now. For the past three or four weeks, I have found it very easy to waste time by hitting Blogger's random blog button over and over again...for hours. A bit weird, I know. For some reason, though, I haven't been able to jump in and start my own, as if I'm waiting for some mystical revelatory flash to light up my computer, telling me to BLOG. I have ideas about what I want to say (more on that in a bit), so it's not like I'm waiting for inspiration, but I am worried about a number of things. Here, in no particular order, are my blog worries:
1. I will say completely stupid things. Does this need explanation?
2. I won't be able to come up with a snappy, not to mention profound, title for my blog. I went through at least a dozen possible titles before arriving at "The Hobgoblin of Little Minds." Titles are important, as I'm constantly haranguing my students: "Paper #2" is NOT (not!!!) a title. So I dangled from my own petard for a while as I contemplated various titles and rejected them.
3. I am--and here is a point I will explore ad nauseam, I am sure--an untenured assistant professor in the humanities at a SLAC. No plans are currently brewing in my (little) mind to slander my school or complain about my colleagues, but I can see the possibility. Doing so might anger the tenure gods, and then I'd have to commit a blood sacrifice in expiation, and no one wants that.
4. Writer's block.
5. Logorrhea--I'll have plenty to say here, where it doesn't count towards that tenure packet (see #3), but does cause an inordinate amount of time to get sucked off to wherever minutes go when they die.
Five seems like a good number, for now at least.