I can't write things down

All of these interesting thoughts that could be posts float through my head and then I forget to write them down. I'm attempting an experiment this week to see if I can blog everyday, even if it's short. Joanna inspired me, what can I say? =)

I had a good conversation with my uncle Art tonight. Granted, I should have been doing homework, but this actually turned into a better than normal conversation that I'm glad I took the time for. Sometimes I can't wrap my brain around how much the world has changed in the last 75 years (arbitrary number, slightly younger than my uncle). To hear his stories of growing up in the rural south as the son of a minister and a teacher, moving a lot, not having a lot of money but making ends meet, milking cows and feeding chickens. It seems eons removed from my life today, growing up in suburbia. Yet I feel like it's part of my past too, and I want to learn more about it. I was intrigued a few weeks ago studying polio briefly in one of my classes, because my grandfather had polio, or a polio-like illness, in 1946. The doctors were baffled as to what it was, which makes me think that it wasn't polio (I'm pretty sure they could recognize it at that time). I tried looking up some of the generic symptoms my uncle was telling me about, but there's really no way I can figure out what it was without a medical record or interviewing someone that was there. But I know they had recently got sulfa drugs at that point, and then penicillin, which was life changing.

Maybe the fact that there are such drastic changes in the last several decades is one reason I love biographies and learning about people's lives- so many of them are so different from my own, simply because of when and where they lived. Sure, reading the biography of a president is informative, but I think reading Laura Ingalls Wilder is just as informative, because it tells how a whole generation of people lived, even if they weren't famous. I wish I could persuade lots of my relatives to write their memoirs simply to record how things were, how they grew up, what life was like in a different time. Famous is relative anyway. One reason I like to write things down is I wonder if in 60 years, my notes and commentary of how I am living today will shed light on now, whereas the future could be vastly different. I don't really thing I'm going to be famous and that people will what to know every detail of my childhood; rather I want to preserve this moment in time for the future.

Why do you blog?