The Others Who 'Speak For Them'

Dave Pollard: “Some of us write down a lot more than others, for a variety of reasons. Some people are inclined to write down only what's useful in their 'work' identities, formalizing their personal/business life split. Some people don't think much of their own thinking, so most of what they write down is links to the writings of, or syntheses of, or addresses of, the people whose thinking they like, the others who 'speak for them', at least in the written world. Some of us just don't spend much time in or see a lot of value in the written world at all -- those who prefer oral or non-verbal communications.”

I'm guilty of the type of thinking emphasized above in Dave's paragraph. The last few months, my weblog has consisted mostly of links not so much to people or ideas I agree with, but to people and ideas that either strike me as interesting or eloquent or both. Writing is hard and time-consuming, but ultimately fun and rewarding. I don't limit "writing" to the physical act of fingers tapping coherent words and sentences on a keyboard. I also include the times on the bus or walking down the street or taking a shower or looking like I'm zoning out at work when thinking of ways to express an idea or a thought or an emotion in paragraph form. Those paragraphs sometimes make it into written form, at least digitally, but are often half- or quarter- or over-baked by the time they make it in textual form.

I'm starting to think that the only time I really think is when I'm writing. Other times, it feels like I've forgotten everything, my mind feeling wrapped in gauze, forgotten in a wasteland where ideas go to die. I'm most impressed by the people who figured out how to keep their brains working 100% of the time, or at least have found a way to make it look like such. They're the people who can recall the things taught to them in school, either the school they physically attended in their teens and twenties or the school of life, from which they will never graduate (which I intend as a compliment).

Rhonda of Static Photography recently wondered if I dream in HTML. I don't: as my reply indicates, I usually dream about what I'm thinking about most at the time, and it so happens thinking about my day job also dominates during sleeping hours. I did once, for a while, think not so much in HTML but in hyperlinks, that is, when "writing" during my short shifts as a library page (which did not require a lot of mental faculty), I would think of what I was going to write for my weblog when I got home and whom I would link to. Those days are largely gone, having a technical support/consulting/programming job values thinking—as opposed to carrying and shelving books, where demand for thinking is low—so often I need to let others do the thinking on my weblog for me.