thoughts occasioned by

a few weeks ago, I discovered quotidiana.org. and I started reading essays, most of them by a person Dr. Madden, who oversees the collection. it was a delightful day of soaking in vignettes of someone else's life. beautiful little pools of elsewhere and otherness, glimmering with that calm sense of unrefutable, individual truth.

somewhere among all the quaint and comfortable prose there I came across the idea (and in that odd way of small discoveries, its precise words and location have evaded all retracings of my steps) that an essay is really any piece of writing whose title can be simply be prefaced with the words 'thoughts occasioned by.' they all begin with thoughts. the words and paragraphs come from our attempts to think those thoughts.

that is how all of these blogposts came about. mostly. first it was all my technical writing classes, thoughts about web design and usability and rhetoric, assigned and reviewed by professors. so much has changed has changed since then.

these days it isn't academia I comment on, but random other little things in life. connections I've made between ideas and experiences and principles and images. it still has a bit of that technology/design/rhetoric edge, so far, because I've kept it that way. not as sharp as it was when I was in it before, but still an edge. and maybe it's too soon to escape those academic beginnings. maybe I'll end up back there before too long. so much of me hopes so.

whatever happens, whatever occasions my next five years of thought, it will need to be written about.

or maybe it won't, but I will need to write about it.