I’ve started three different posts in the last two days and haven’t had the motivation to finish any of them. It’s a sad state of affairs when the thing I want to complain about most is the thing that saps my enthusiasm write it down. One of these false starts looks promising, though, so it may go up some time over the weekend if I can work the kinks out and find a reserve of give-a-damn.

You’ve probably noticed lately that the volume and length of posts haven’t exactly been lighting the world on fire. It’s certainly not that the world has stopped pissing me off or that people have suddenly become less obnoxious. The routine of nine hours in class, grabbing some dinner at the nearest chain restaurant, and then heading back to the hotel to try keeping up with my actual job hasn’t been terribly conducive to generating new and interesting complaints (not that Sunday afternoons in Western Maryland are any more helpful in identifying issues, really). I get the sense that seven or eight consecutive posts about what asshats my fellow students are doesn’t exactly make for interesting reading. Of course the president has now won a Nobel Prize for having displayed great potential for influencing the future development of peaceful international relations, so I suppose anything is possible…

Keeping a personal blog is like walking a razor between sharing enough to keep things interesting and holding enough back to keep some semblance of privacy. At the moment, there are a number of things I want to write down as well as many that I have scribbled notes for already. Unfortunately, most of those fall into the category of things that I will never be brave or foolish enough to publish. So that leaves me alone with my neatly typed out thoughts and a blank space where my next blog should be. Of course there is something delightfully tempting about flooding the interwebs with post after post and laying bare the mental gymnastics I go through when deciding what to post and what will not see the light of day. But, at heart I remain an intensely private person whose best course for years has been in keeping his own counsel. So again tonight, I will sign off with the simple promise that there are better posts to come… Assuming, that is, I can get myself unmuddled and back down to business.

Well, friends, we’ve reached 100 posts here on Blogger. I’ve been struggling with what topic to hit on this evening. Usually I try to keep the focus on current events or just randomness that has caused aggravation or consternation during the day. At the moment, however, the news is full of things that are cause for annoyance… and I’m too tired of reading and hearing about most of it to throw my two cents into the ether. As for the general grievances, I’ve been airing most of them in status messages this week, so there’s no need to cover that ground twice.

Starting tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be headed back in the general direction of Memphis (with an overnight in Maryland). I always look forward to these trips back to the mid-Atlantic, but on the tail end of this one, I’m ready to get back into the routine. These people have been quite simply exhausting. I’ve managed to spend some quality time with the family and meet up with a few old friends while I was here. Hopefully I can count on a repeat and then some if my schedule holds and I’m back in October for a few weeks. Not sure if I’ll be posting between the time I leave and when I get back to West Tennessee, but when stupid happens, you’ll read it first here.

P.S. I’m watching “The First 48” (not in Memphis this week) and they are interrogating a suspect named “Royal Cola.” Can someone tell me WTF parents are thinking when they do that? I can only hope that his middle name isn’t “Crown,” but it seems more likely than not.