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What is this?

This is a blog I've created partially for my own amusement and partially to get thoughts out there. Every morning I have a pretty long commute to school, and the fact that I board a vehicle operated by the Service de Transport de Montreal (Montreal Transport Service) by 6:45 means my brain is not quite awake enough to be doing, say, differential calculus or any such thing. However, it's awake enough to annoy me to no end with random thoughts.

Why are you tormenting the world such?

As I mentioned before, the long bus/train/metro ride lends itself to just letting the mind wander. Whenever mine does that I often have a hard time reeling it back in but that's not the point. Anyone who has been on an overnight flight, or at least a flight where everyone else goes to sleep, will know that long periods of just sitting without a whole lot to do means things start running through your head and eventually you grab one and start mulling it over. I find this process for me results either in some major epiphanies or, far more often, leads, after a while, to completely pointless and useless circles or destructive over-criticism of oneself. Thus, while performing a similar process while trying to get my brain to kindly shut up to let me get some much needed sleep I had one of the epiphany moments; that is, to just use my time on the train to write about various topics. In addition, I've been challenged by multiple groups and people during this single past week to spend more regular times with God. Yes, this blog has theological implications; a lot of them. While granted, this is not a strictly theological setting it will be discussed quite a lot in my effort to meet and far exceed this challenge.

So...again what exactly is this?

Well now that I've provided the background to my decision to create this I can better answer the original question. This is my blank canvas. My portal throw which to throw my ideas. About anything. Ever. I find myself ranting about topics to people who, quite frankly, couldn't care less. That's all the proof I really need for an excuse to make this. That is, I'm bothering people by taking up their time releasing pent-up rants at them, so why not put it here where I get the relief given by delivering the rant and yet if people don't want to see it they don't need to? That's this right here.

What are you going to write about?

Nothing specific. Really just whatever caused me to lose yet another hour of sleep the night before, or something that I've been thinking about recently, or maybe even a news story; frankly, if you're here for discussion of any one topic then you're in the wrong place. There will be no order or organization to any of the topics, well, other than chronological order.

How exactly is this working anyways?

All that really happens is that I pull out my laptop at some point on the trip from home to school in the morning, most likely to happen while waiting for the train. I'll just write about whatever particular topic I have for that day until the end of my journey on the train and once at school (ergo, internet) a quick ctrl-c ctrl-v puts it here and I'm done. This also answers the next question, which is...

What the helium are you thinking in starting a new blog when your photoblog has not been touched for nearly three months???

The simple fact that the primary purpose of this blog is for it to be a more constructive way to spend the wee hours when I'm travelling to school. Unlike the photoblog, which requires a lot of time in that the photos must be selected, uploaded, put into the post, described, small blurb, and so on, this is not going to get any editing or special effects at all, although I might try to throw in the subject-related image here and there to break up the wall of text. That said, yes, I'm trying to set aside time to put work into the photoblog. Hush. That doesn't need to be discussed here.

How often are you going to make a post?

More often than my photoblog. That's all I can really say. Ideally I'd be making a post every time I go to school, which is every weekday. But what with varying daily schedules there may be times where I don't. But again, all I'm doing is basically freewriting and then putting the result on the internet.

So what are your goals in making this?

Primarily I just want to free up a little brain space. Secondly, I do hope to make things interesting enough to generate some discussion of ideas or theories or whatever I've rambled about. Third, if I miraculously manage to actually help anyone in this, that would be great.

So there we go. Welcome to Trains of Thought.

This will be permanently on display in the "About/FAQ" tab.


And does anyone else find it strange that I just wrote a FAQ for the intro....?