Why am I Blogging?

As a kid, I could always write pretty well. At least my writing was good enough to get mostly A's on written assignments in school. But, I don't ever remember writing for fun. I think part of the "problem" was that my handwriting is not very good. It was never easy for me to put a lot of words on paper.

As a Freshman in high school, I was in the first class at Hanston High School to take Typing on a keyboard instead of a typewriter (yes, I am that old). Of course, being Hanston High School, we had Apple knock-offs called Franklins. This was pre-Macintosh (yes, I am even that old). While not a typing whiz, for a guy in the HHS class of '90, I was pretty good. Typing, maybe word processing is a better term, made writing less of a chore for me. While I didn't start my first novel, I was more open to the idea of putting my thoughts down.

I think the next big step in my development as an eventual blogger came with my first email account as a graduate student at KU in 1995: thubin@falcon.ukans.edu, I believe. It turned out I could write a thousand word email in no time at all and send it out into the ether. It's like it didn't really count if it was never printed on paper. I could write as much as I want! Even today, I find myself apologizing for the lengths of my emails in the last sentence or so before I send them.

Writing scientific papers, a book chapter, and an entire thesis have given me practice on the long forms of non-fiction. I've also had a lot of opportunities to write minutes, committee reports, and responses to administrative actions. Most recently, I've been getting practice with persuasive scientific writing through a series of grant proposals.

All of this writing for work, however, hasn't given me an outlet for more personal writing. Late last year, I took a "Letters from Dad" course through my church, where I wrote my wife and each of my kids a personal letter telling them why I value them and love them, among other things. This experience, along with my recent addiction to Joe Posnanski's uber blog, has made me think about starting a blog several times over the last year or two. I recently got onto facebook, but find the word limit on posts constantly restricting. Don't even get me started on the idea of the 140 character limit of twitter (although I must admit it does sound like an interesting challenge to try to communicate with such a limit).

So, there you have it. That's why I'm blogging. We'll all find out together if I have anything interesting to say, and if I do, if anyone is listening.