This blog is meant to be the dumping ground for blog posts that I started but never finished. These are all blog posts that I feel embarrassed by and so don't want to post them on my main blog. At the same time, however, they are all posts I spent some time on, and so couldn't bring myself to delete entirely. Hiding them out here represents a compromise with myself between publishing them on my main blog, and deleting them completely.
Having admitted that I am embarrassed about all of these blog posts, I suppose it goes without saying that they are all deeply flawed pieces for one reason or another. I don't recommend you read any of them, but if you do read them don't expect much.
The dates each post was posted has no relationship to when it was actually composed.
Many of these blog posts were composed between September 2004 and March 2006. During this time, I was employed in Japan, and had too much free time on my hands. I had to stay at work every day, but many days I wasn't given any job to do. So, I spent a lot of time writing blog posts.
I had by this point possibly been in Japan too long. I spent all day as the only foreigner in the office communicating in my poor Japanese, and perhaps my desire to express myself more resulted in the prodigious blogging output I did during those years. The long-winded nature of all of these posts are perhaps also a result of the same.
My Political Journey was written during October 2004. Like most of the other posts here, it's primary raison d'etre was just that I had way too much time to kill at work. Further than that, it was an attempt to try to explain to everyone all the reasons why I had grown up in a conservative Christian environment, and had rejected many of the political and religious ideas I had been brought up with. Back when I was attending a predominately Conservative Christian college, us liberals had the feeling of being an embattled minority, and this was occasionally a question people would pose me. It had 3 years since I had left home when I wrote this but, I was perhaps still at this point viewing the debate in my old frame of mind where I felt like I needed to constantly explain and justify all my views. (Now that I've been away from home, and hanging out in more liberal areas of the world for so long, it would never occur to me to write this. Being liberal isn't something you have to justify anymore, it's just the way it is.)
My political views and evolving religious views were intertwined, so I tried to write about the interplay they had had over the years as they were still evolving. At the time I wrote this, I was not yet a full blown agnostic, but more of a religious pluralist, who was still relatively happy under the label of "Christianity".
Japanese Woman, Western Men
This is actually a very popular topic in the expat community in Japan. The general feeling is that Japanese woman like Western men, and that's probably true as far as it goes, but it gets more difficult to pinpoint this in terms of exact degree. I tried to sort out some of the factors in this blog post, but it's a topic that's hard to write about without embarrassing yourself, and I wish I would have just left it alone.
My Worst Moments was an attempt to use my blog as a public confession for all the things I had done that I felt terrible about. This is probably never a good idea.
Likewise with Insights into My Insanity, in which I tried to publicly detail and examine all my personality defects. This is also probably not the best thing to do on a blog. Insights Into My Insanity in particular was written at a time when I had probably been in Japan for too long, and was at a low point in the Culture Shock cycle. It was also during another point where I was underworked at my job, and was probably spending too much time in my own head listening to my own thoughts.
My 12th Grade Senior Speech, Conservative Upbringing, and My Friends were all still written while I was in Japan. At this point I had come up with the idea for doing a retrospection project on my blog, in which I would mine old journals and diaries from college and high school to get some good blog post material. However, being still in Japan at this point, I didn't have access to my old journals. So instead I just typed up some posts reminiscing about my childhood in preparation for when I would start the Retrospection project one day. As it turned out, I decided against publish all of these.
Comic Books and Me was also written during that same time period.
All those posts mentioned above are from the same time period (September 2004 to March 2006). I had previously published them in a post here.
The next few posts are from slightly later.
Since I left my position of religious pluralism, and became an agnostic (around about 2008 or so) I've tried several times over the years to write a justification of it. Anyone who comes from a religious background will no doubt identify with this--all your friends and family believe one thing (and often believe you are going to hell because of your beliefs) and you feel like you want to explain why you believe differently.
Unfortunately, the subject has many different dimensions, and it is perhaps too vast for one blog post.
My Political Journey--mentioned above--is perhaps the first in the series of trying to explain why I left conservative Christianity. (Although I was still religious when I wrote it, I was no longer a conservative Christian).
The next post was Why I'm an Agnostic July 2010. I started it, but the subject was too vast for me to finish.
I came back to the subject half a year later. I felt like in the previous attempt I had written myself into a corner, so instead of continuing on from the previous attempt, I just completely started a completely new draft on Why I'm an Agnostic.
In order to try to get some sort of handle on a complex problem, my plan was to try to first write a "religious autobiography" detailing all my thoughts and religious experiences from childhood to the present, and then come back afterwards and attack the philosophical issues in a more concrete way later. I never finished this attempt either.
In Defense of the Spoiled Middle Class Student Radical was written in January of 2011. The previous year there had been student protests in France (over the pension reforms) and in England (over tuition increases), and I had read a number of editorials in the mainstream press complaining about spoiled middle class student protesters. I was influenced by Chomsky's idea that Universities are centers of activism simply because anywhere people can gather and make connections with each other are going to be centers of activism, and not because of anything inherent about the type of students who go there. I tried to write a long essay expanding on Chomsky's original idea, but gave up eventually.
Criticizing Chomsky is another post I started but gave up on (after the furor caused by Chomsky's comments in the week following Osama Bin Laden's death).
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