I will never stop blogging

I'm sitting here in mid-day, with three weeks off from medical school, feeling overwhelmed despite having a totally open schedule--I have to write up the findings from my research project in the form of a real scientific paper, to be published in an actual medical journal--so I thought I'd procrastinate by posting a blog entry.

One of the reasons I don't post more often is that I have so much to do in medical school. Now, it's not that I'm always working; I wind up procrastinating as much as anyone else, but as long as I have work to do I usually feel I shouldn't spend the time blogging (merely browsing my favorite blogs is more passive, and thus easier to allow myself to do.) But I like blogging when I can, no matter how infrequently I do it, and thus one of the phenomena I don't understand is permanently closing one's blog. I was thinking about this after reading that Anakin Niceguy is closing up shop. Novaseeker did the same thing in January, and I know there have been other bloggers I used to read, or at least check in on occasionally, whose names I can't remember right now, who announced an official end to blogging. (At least those guys are leaving their blogs up, though. One thing I really can't understand is deleting your blog. Unless you fear that the thought police are coming after you in real life, what harm is there in leaving it up, for posterity's sake?)

Sure, there are disadvantages to being an infrequent blogger, namely, that you lose regular readership. There was a time when I was posting nearly every day, and got a lot more hits than I do now. When it's been weeks since you've posted, people simply stop dropping by, as I myself have with Ganttsquarry and A.J. Travis. But, they may post again someday. Why foreclose that possibility by announcing that you are officially done with blogging?

All of this is not to criticize or argue with people who stop blogging; just to say that, no matter how infrequently I write a substantive post, I'll always be around.

Where have I been?

I apologize to whomever out there had decided to follow this blog on a semi-regular basis. I received many compliments on my posts, but I knew this day would come--or rather, the day that came a few months ago, when I began 3rd year of medical school and had to place the blog lower on my list of priorities. The problem is compounded by the fact that I did not study as hard as I could have during the first two years of medical school (as evidenced by the fact, documented on this very blog, that I was spending at least some of my time thinking about politics, when most of my classmates were spending a much greater portion of their time thinking about nothing but anatomy, physiology, pathology, and biochemistry.) So now, I feel compelled to spend some of my spare time studying to ensure that I'm prepared for my experiences on the wards.

However--and I questioned for a long time whether this blog should take a more personal turn, as many do, but I think it's inevitable--there was something else non-medical I was spending a good deal of my time over the last two years thinking about, something that, in fact, consumed me and kept me preoccupied most of the time, and that is, woman. I seldom admit this in person, but a large proportion of my motivation for pursuing medicine was my belief that, by doing something conventionally considered "prestigious", and positioning myself as a good future provider, I would become attractive to women. The slow and painful discrediting of that belief has occupied most of the time I spend thinking about non-med school-related matters over the past 8 months or so, and it commenced last fall, when I discovered the seduction community.

I had had two brief intimations of this community in years prior, which I may describe later, and it repulsed me at first. But this time, something compelled me to investigate it further, and I have now read, or viewed in one case, several seduction-related materials. I must say that my eyes have been opened to the nature of women and of male-female relations, both in traditional times and in modern society. So many of my past experiences, as well as my frustrations in finding that being a medical student got me nowhere even with conservative Christian women, suddenly make sense, now that I see them through the light of female hypergamy. It really is, as a commenter said somewhere, like finally seeing the Matrix.

Now, this is not about to become a PUA blog. Lord knows there are enough of them out there already, and I am not about to give up on Christian sexual morality in an attempt to reinvent myself as a player. However, I've decided that in our society, however unfortunate it may be, a guy has to learn some "game" just to attract a decent wife. I'm sure that now and then, when I do find time to post, the topics of dating, sexual relations, marriage, etc. will come up more often than they have.

I've also added two blogs, which discuss these matters in ways I find helpful, to my blogroll: Novaseeker and The Elusive Wapiti. There are others which I browse from time to time, which I may add when they come to mind.

On writing

In the preface to Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor tells of how the original idea for the book was an unfinished story he was working on when his briefcase was stolen in a train station. It was never recovered, and he found himself unable to recreate the story as he remembered it. The more time passed, the better the lost story seemed, and he never felt the book was nearly as good.

I often have the same experience when writing. An idea is never as good as when it first occurs to me, and if I can't manage to get all my thoughts down in writing while they are still fresh in my mind, the eventual product always seems to pale in comparison to the original idea. My previous entry, which was finally published on June 3, 2008, was begun on August 26, 2007. At that time, I typed up the few key points that had occurred to me, and was able to envision them fully developed, but didn't have time to write them down that way. As the weeks passed, the original fervor that had surrounded the ideas in my mind began to wane, and while I'd try to work on the post now and then, the results never seemed up to snuff. Finally, when I had more time to blog again, I realized that my view of that post as an important one, and its being unfinished, was keeping me from starting to post more often again, and I forced myself to finish it. But in my mind, it is not nearly as good as it could have been, or would have been if I had written it the day the idea came to me.

I sometimes think the mark of distinction between a merely good writer and a great writer is how clear, detailed, and permanent his ideas are in his head before they have been written down. I remember how astounded I was when in college I first read Wordsworth's note to his Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, nonchalantly mentioning that he had composed the entire 150+ line poem in his mind over the course of 4-5 days while on a walking tour, and not written any of it down until it was finished. That is the mark of genius--something most of us cannot even imagine being able to do.