You Can be a Blogger Too!

I think it is a fallacy that to be a writer, you have to be an interesting person. After all, they always tell you: ‘write what you know.’ If all you have known is a boring life, how can you write about that? Who would want to read it? I have been doing this blog for six years now. While I do not fool myself that this is the New Yorker, I am reasonably pleased with the work I have done. Though I write it mainly for me, it has gotten some notice. This blog seems to be particularly popular in Hong Kong for some reason.

I say all this because I am not an interesting person. Well, I am as interesting as the next guy, but I mean I am not especially interesting. I have not discovered any scientific breakthroughs, ridden a rocket to space, joined the Peace Corps to help people in some dark corner of the world. I have never been in the military, not a doctor, nor ridden the Deadliest Catch ice waves of Alaska. On the other hand, I have not had my city bombed or suffered unspeakable tragedy (knock wood). I have never been oppressed and fought against my oppressors. I have had the minor victories, minor adventures, and minor tragedies that befall most people.

It does not matter if you are average, if you haven’t set the world on fire. You still have stories to tell. Everyone does. You don’t have to have sailed the seven seas to find interesting things. A story about being a bus boy at a restaurant can be interesting if it is well written. And that is just if you “write what you know.” There is no law that says you have to write what you know. That is what imagination is for. That is kind of the whole point of art.

If you don’t think you have stories to tell, you are probably wrong. Getting those stories out in a form that anyone would want to read . . . that is the hard part. But it is attainable with practice. You do get better at writing the more you do it. My first stories were pretty bad if I am honest, but the stories got better as I went along. Excuse me, the stories didn’t get better; the writing got better. So if you have ever had a desire to express yourself, just do it.

Star Liner

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The Trip Home

My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and

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Second Wind

You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running. In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, which is tr

A speculative mind

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