Stepping Back

NOTE: This post is long, rambling, and autobiographical, but there is a point. I think.

You may have noticed that I've been blogging a bit less for the last couple days. Or you may not have noticed any difference whatsoever.

In any case, I realized a few days ago that I've been doing a ton of writing on this site, but I haven't taken a lot of time to expand my horizons, so to speak. Basically, the majority of my blogging has been based on information that I either learned from absorption or actively taught myself over the past couple years. Let's hear a resounding "hooray for public school."

Yeah. I started getting interested in politics at age 16, shortly after 9/11 (I'm part of the "terrorism opened my eyes to the real world" club), and I really got into it around late 2002/early 2003. In a very short time, I changed from a right-leaning moderate to a full-fledged conservative, and have remained that way ever since. Oddly enough, before that time, I thought that anything even vaguely associated with the political world was about as exciting as racing injured snails.

I guess I'm just lucky that my school district was run by 100% idiots, as opposed to liberal moonbats, or things may have been different. My life experiences taught me that stupidity in any form was the enemy, so even without the knowledge of how dumb leftist positions can be, conservatism was the natural political choice. I was on the rifle team, after all.

After I had formed the basis for my opinions from experiences alone, I set out on a quest for actual knowledge. Since my school classes weren't giving me everything I needed, I turned to the Internet. I started out slowly, but by the summer of 2003, I was devoting lots of time to learning everything I could about topics that hadn't been covered in high school and weren't available in my upcoming college classes.

So, if anyone was wondering, most of the stuff I write on this blog is based on my fact-finding journey last summer. I found information on all kinds of topics, like current events, political issues, philosophy, and religion.

While studying some of these, I also learned about argumentation and logic. This was definitely the most important step of the journey, because now, I could actually analyze the things I was reading. If you've been reading SIT for any length of time, you know how big I am on consistency of arguments, opinions, etc. FYI, I learned most of these lessons from reading/listening to Greg Koukl and associates. Virtually all my anti-abortion arguments, as well as a few on same-sex marriage, are based on STR's information. Good stuff.

Of course, the next logical step in this journey was finding a way to share the information I'd learned. After all, once my eyes were opened, I couldn't stand to see all the stupidity and ignorance in the world without at least trying to do something about it. That's how Semi-Intelligent Thoughts came about.

In the beginning, it was just going to be a place to put pre-written excerpts from my "Book of Semi-Intelligent Thoughts" (more about that here and here), but soon, I began writing original rants. You all know the end of this story, since you're reading the blog now, so I don't have to go into more detail.

If you're still reading (cue the crickets!), you're probably wondering what the point of all this could be. Here it is:

For the past 8 months, I've been writing about various topics on an almost-daily basis. I've also learned a lot more from reading other blogs, news sources, and articles. However, I realized a few days ago that I'm running out of things to say. Most of the stuff I write has been based on that same information that I learned last summer, and although I have found out a lot more than I ever thought possible from the blogosphere, I really haven't been paying as much attention. I had to get my own words out there, and there was also schoolwork (I think that's what they call it) to worry about, so the learning process slowed down a bit.

Now that I'm on vacation, I have the same amount of free time that I did last summer, and even though I'll probably be getting a part-time job in the next couple weeks, I'll still have an opportunity to take in more information relevant to blogging, instead of just regurgitating what I already know. I've already started doing this, which is why I'm posting less.

What I'm saying is that I want to know more. I need to seek out new sources of information and review what I already know. For example, I'm planning on reading "1984" by George Orwell, as it's available online at a few sites. I read it when I was 15, but I had no idea what it was about, and due to time constraints, I completely skipped the part that explains Party philosophy, so I want to go back and look at it all over again. There's also a lot of other stuff that I can read, and I want to spend more time looking at other blogs as opposed to updating my own.

This doesn't mean that I'm done blogging, of course. I'll still try to post every day, and some days will be heavier than others, but the writing process was starting to overshadow the learning process, and honestly, I feel like I don't know enough to intelligently rant about half the topics that are coming up these days. You may have noticed that I didn't say anything about the gay marriages in Massachusetts. That's because I've said everything I know! There's nothing left, but I want to change that.

I hope you'll understand. Just keep coming back, and I'll try to be more informed from now on.