Day One on the Blogosphere

Here I am in the amazing and magical 21st century, finally, I am a complete citizen of our cyber and information community. 

I have to say I never believed I would blog. It just seemed too exhibitionist to me, too pretentious. I mean really, who cares what in the goodness gracious I have to say? Maybe four or five people? Can't I just right them emails or set up a group on Facebook? 

Somewhere in the past year I guess my opinion began to change, as I read more and more blogs, blogs written by intelligent people discussing the merits of ideas and institutions. And I also began to start to write more myself, sometimes in a polemic fashion, sometimes in a more direct, open discourse. I started in my school paper and even a couple of times writing letters to the editor of major newspapers, who needless to say didn't always publish my thoughts. But it felt good to put my hand to pad and work with my words to give spirit to my thought dreams. Blogging all of a sudden is not only for the cyber geek or the overly adept teenage drama queen. It is for the men and women of the republic of letters.

I am currently stationed at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where I am attending the United States Army's Officer Candidate School. I just graduated from Basic Training at Ft Jackson, last Friday and I am actually in a holding company at the moment. I will know if I class up with Bravo Company by next Tuesday. Hopefully my time here will provide me with a few interesting stories to share on this forum.

I was born in West Philadelphia and was raised there until I was six years old, when my family moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I grew up there until I was nineteen years old when I moved to Indiana to go to a small Quaker school for four years, which was where I met my wonderful wife, who is from Portland, Oregon (in a nutshell). I am 23 years old and by far the most definitive experience of my life was watching the World Trade Center towers collapse with my own eyes when I was fifteen years old from my classroom window. That absolutely surreal experience marked my first true encounter with the world, an encounter which has thrust my path in an otherwise unlikely direction for the son of two Upper West side academics.