Hi, everyone! Due to overwhelming requests, I am starting a website in order to organize my thoughts and share my opinions with the world. But before we go any further, I should point out that the use of the phrase “overwhelming requests” in the previous sentence actually refers to the nagging thoughts I have in my head. No one outside my head actually made such a request.

While I do enjoy playing around with websites and learning HTML and PHP coding, my main goal for this project is to get a handle on my actual beliefs. I grew up in a time where the phrase “question everything” was often displayed on posters, bumper stickers, and even building graffiti. This precept guided my teenage development and has followed me into adulthood. As such, I not only play the devil’s advocate with every new idea, but also have a hard time making a decision or affirming a position on topics since I’m always looking at both sides equally.

You could say this is a good thing…keeping an open mind. And for the most part I believe it has helped me over the years. But there have also been some drawbacks, especially when dealing with people who don’t want a discussion, they just want a bottom line…and I don’t have one. Keeping an open mind is important for the learning process. But learning is just the first step toward maturity. Once learned, information needs to be synthesized, integrated, then applied. There comes a point at which an open mind becomes a detriment. A belief must eventually be established and other opinions discarded. I am not there yet.

I liken this to painting the walls of your house. It’s perfectly acceptable, even recommended, to consider different color options before you begin. Get paint samples, apply in small patches, and see how you like it throughout the day. You may find you like a color you didn’t even consider at the beginning. But you should only do this for a short time. Eventually you have to select a color and move forward. Otherwise your house stays in a constant state of disarray and you never get to enjoy the house. The comparison is especially apt for me as my house has been in this halfway state for more than five years now.

This website will help me externalize my thoughts, allowing me to look at them rationally and organize them into a hierarchical structure. That is the idea, anyway. So while some of the posts will seem frivolous to you, I do not take the time post here unless there is a connection to another belief, idea, thought. You could say the website is more for me than you. Nevertheless, please enjoy.

UPDATE (15 Jan 2024): I resurrected this site through the use of waybackmachine.org. Going back into each snapshot of this site over the past 17 years, I was able to regenerate many of my posts from over the years. Although I lost some posts I would like to see again, I am impressed with the amount I was able to reconstruct. So the original intent of this site…to organize my thoughts only post connected ideas…doesn’t really apply anymore. Now it’s just for fun. But given that it spans 17 years, at the writing of this post, it may well be the longest project of my entire life. That alone provides the motivation to keep it alive.