I have a strange habit.  Often while sitting on the couch watching TV, or lying in bed reading, I get the strange urge to stick my hand straight up in the air and hold it there for a minute or so.  My family used to laugh at me for doing it, or "call on me" like I was attending some kind of living room lecture, but now they just accept it as one of my quirks.  They used to ask what it was all about.  "I don't know.  It just feels good.  Rather, it just feels right," I would say.  I too, had chalked it up to some kind of short circuit in my synapses, but in my recent commitment to being more self-reflective, I caught my hand shoot up recently and took another stab at understanding.

Perhaps I am "raising my hand."  Maybe, subconsciously I feel that I have more to say to the world and I am just waiting to be called upon.  The progressive educator in me prefers my students to just speak freely and let the dialogue flow without the need for archaic signaling that this would be an appropriate time for the sage on the stage to allow commentary from one of the lesser students.  But this is the system I grew up in, and maybe I can't fully accept that I do not need permission to speak to the universe.

Could it be the world's easiest stretch?  As I get older and my muscles seem to grow tighter every day, I know I should be stretching more.  My doctor's say it.  All the fitness magazines say it (which is why i don't read them).  My hips have been screaming at me to stretch every since I had surgery on both of them 2 years ago. Needless to say, I don't often respond to the call, so maybe my body is trying to do it subconsciously.

Black Power Fist?  It isn't usually a fist, but this gesture is one of the first things my father taught me growing up.  He was a white dude who wanted to make sure he instilled a strong sense of culture in his adopted son. You can read more about that can of worms in a future post on my NORWAY (NO Really, What Are You) blog, but for now just accept that it seemed like a good idea to him in the early seventies.  I am not sure when I started the hand in the air thing, but my dad passed away about 7 years ago, and if he were to haunt me, I am sure possessing my arm to do the Black power fist would be high on his list of tricks to try.

And then it came to me.  It is an act of defiance!  Many of my students have heard my spiel on the petty rules that society tries to pass off as laws under the direction of religion or government:  Thou shall not do this or that or we will take away your rights or your soul or feed you to the lions.  But things like entropy, and conservation of matter, and gravity - now those are real laws!  You can't break them no matter hard you try!  But we DO try.  It is human nature to try!  And as I laid in bed the other night, looking up at my hand floating above me, watching it sway slightly back and forth as it resisted the pull of the whole world around it, I understood.  

I will fight you till the end, gravity!  I may not cliff dive or skateboard anymore, and I know my days of backflips and acrobatics are numbered, but I will die fighting!  I DO have something to say to the world.  I may not be stretching my body, but I will stretch the limits you try to enforce with THIS act of defiance.  This Black-(hole) (quantum)-Power (pseudo)-fist is for you!  Suck it, gravity!

Yesterday, I looked at my website several dozen times.  Two days ago, I put a few tiny pieces of myself on a few tiny web pages, and so now what?  Are people looking at it?  Weebly says about 80 separate people stopped by, but who are those people?  Still no comments.  Does that mean that it isn't comment worthy, or just that those who looked didn't have anything to say?  Perhaps those who looked were repulsed, or insulted, or simply angry that they wasted their limited time looking at trash like this.  Maybe this was a bad idea.  The nerve of someone, who admits he doesn't like writing, starting a blog and then having the first entry basically broadcast to anyone who might have read it, "Hey, look at me!  I am about to do something I hate doing!  Doesn't that sound boring?  Don't invest any more time reading because clearly it won't last.  Remember, I hate this!"

Woah!  Where does all this fear come from?  I have been too successful in my life to be someone crippled by fear.  So what if it is what our society is based on?  Of course, our society was also built on the backs of slaves, and we seem to still be fighting that fight, so maybe it makes sense to be fearful of that which is new or hard or public or personal.  Okay, so one more thing to fight against (and two more things to write about in future posts: Fear and Slavery)!  But for now, let me attempt to share my goals for myself (becoming a blogger) and for this blog in general:

1. Understand my relationship to writing (see Blog post #1)
2. Understand my relationship to a culture of fear (see above)
3. Inspire dialogue (okay, that is something new - a.k.a write stuff that people want to read)
4. Build a habit of daily reflection (this is where I commit to 3 blog posts weekly and make my first attack on #2)
5. Build community (I realize the flailing I am doing now with these initial blogs aren't going to unite friends and family, let alone recruit others to create meaningful bonds around anything, but I am optimistic about eventually hitting my flow, and here I will have a record of how it started)
6. Find joy (I'm not entirely sure what I mean by this yet, but it's definitely part of it)
7. Laugh (This is kind of part of #6, but I want to name it specifically because I specifically want to laugh: with and at myself and others and the world.  Also, 7 seems better to me than 6)

So now, I guess I print this list out and tape it to the lower left corner of my laptop, right?  Sounds like a plan. Thanks again for reading, and please let me know if you did.  A comment would be great, but even a simple "Like" would be rad.  This may just be the fear talking again, but your comments may help bring me a little closer to understanding it all.  Thanks for your support.

As the title suggests (or actually just states outright), I don't like to write.  I have never liked to write.  I would much rather be doing a whole host of other things like exercising, watching TV, playing games, playing music, talking, or just sitting doing nothing.  I don't keep a journal or a diary.  Writing a simple thank you note is like torture for me.  I am even annoyed when I have to write a check.  

So why have I decided to start a blog?  Well, I would love to say that I hope that regular practice will make the process easier and slowly begin to develop deep down within me an affinity for putting words to paper.  But despite generally being a very optimistic person, I am particularly pessimistic that this experiment will have any effect toward lessening the pain and suffering I am about to put myself through.  I mean, I have been writing for something like 35 years now - through grade school and high school and college and grad school and a career as a teacher and school administrator.  I have put in over double my 10,000 hours.  I have a writing callous on my middle finger that looks like a birth defect and sends my kids running away screaming, "Dado, don't touch me with your disgusting finger bump!"  Screw writing!  It couldn't save the Ancient Egyptians even when it possessed magical powers and looked way cooler than the squiggly lines we make.

In any case, I have still committed to writing this blog, but just because I want to better understand WHY I don't like writing.  I am a creative guy with lots of ideas in my head, and my wife doesn't always appreciate me talking her ear off every night.  I should want to do this.  I should be embracing it.  And as I mentioned above, I have done it enough that I should be at least halfway decent at it.  So WHY? WHY do I hate it so?  Well that is what I am hoping to get out of this, and I apologize ahead of time for all the times that I get overly metacognitive and write blog entries analyzing what it felt like to write other blog entries.  But maybe I will learn something, and for all of you out there that also have a distaste for this form of civilized communication, perhaps it will give you something to think about as well.  Please let me know your thoughts. It's time for me to stop this agony and go back to sitting and doing nothing.