• I’m not a good blogger as defined by quality of the content I produce or size of the audience that reads it. However I still like writing online because it gives me the feeling of having put my thoughts into the public square without the vulnerability that comes with anyone actually, you know, reading it.
• I really enjoy playing with server-side goodies like CMS and PHP scripts. My interest in the technology side of the web is enough for me to justify having my own website, whether the content there is useful to (or visited by!) anyone else or not.
• I write with my family and friends in mind, letting them know what I’ve been thinking lately.
• I have a penchant for writing about photos I’ve posted to Flickr.com.

• Occassionally I’ll swing for the fences and write something topical that I hope will get read in the general blogosphere. Even then don’t expect too much from me because, like I said in the first bullet, I’m not a very good blogger.

This is my question! What do I fear? Everything.

I fear Everything!

I fear dying. I fear cancer. I fear the long, terrible, scary procedures I would undergo if I got cancer.

I fear what I don’t understand. I fear every pain in my body. Every dull ache is deep bone cancer; every bruise or mole that I can’t remember is leprosy or melanoma; every cramp is food poisoning or deep vein thrombosis.

I fear randomness: the random shooting; the random carjacking; the wrong place at the wrong time.

I fear eating from tin cans with dents; potato chip bags that don’t hold air; yogurt cups without safety foil beneath the plastic lid; any kind of medicine because Tylenol once had cyanide in it.

I fear being out of control. I fear things that might “just happen” to me. I fear that my food has been poisoned so I want to be assured through safe packaging and rigorous, ritualistic preparation processes.

I fear that I already have some deadly illness and the next symptom may be the one that lets me in on the secret and begins an ever-accelerating downward spiral of frightening treatments and bewildering real life medical nightmares.

I worry about what happens when I must suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I fear the random, terrible fate.

What do you Love?

I love being smart. I love being looked up to as a guy who has his shit together. I’d love to be the smartest guy in the room; the stillest water running deepest; the guy whose response is always so completely not what you thought it was going to be but still so incredibly thought-provoking that you can’t believe anyone’s mind works like that.

I’m not that guy. I know a guy like that, but I ain’t him.

I’m not smart, but due to a few successes in my early education I believed that I was smarter than most people all the way thru jr. and sr. high school. I’ve long since disabused my rational mind of the notion that I’m smarter than most people, but it’s a permanent part of my psyche to still think that I am.

So, basically, I love having my shit together. Shitful togetherness! I would love to have absolutely no chinks in my armor.

What do you Hate?

I hate to be wrong. I hate to be looked down upon. I hate being embarrassed. I hate to admit that I have no idea what you’re talking about; and could you, Dr. Med-School, please tell me what periorbital cellulitis is because you’ve mentioned it twice now as if I’m already supposed to know some medical term that you went to med. school to learn? Yet somehow I feel like the stupid one for not having paid $260,000 to learn a fancy term for a swollen eyelid.

I hate to be embarrassed. I hate to look stupid. I hate to ask questions that I think may possibly make me look stupid. Stupid is in the eye of the beholder and I constantly think I’m either stupid or else on the verge of being beheld that way.

Hate that.

What do you hope for, want, or crave?

I want to be validated. You should tell me I’m valuable…I shouldn’t have to!

In high school there were the cool kids. I was not one of them, but I always wanted to be with them. It was coolness by proximity. I never felt cool, but if the cool kids liked me then I must be cool anyway. “I wonder what the cool kids are doing? None of them are here. I’d better go find them.”

Now I crave to be a cool kid. Cool Adult. Cool parent. Cool housekeeper. Cool beer drinker. Cool socialite. Cool bass player. Cool Christian. Cool blogger.