Drinking human tea

It seems to me
that used bathwater
is simply human tea.

Human tea
would be
caffeine-free.

So, what do you do with a first blog post, anyway? Write a mission statement?
How 'bout I just write some words, and then we'll talk about what happened when I'm done.

For the last year or so, I've been sitting at work, mourning my university lifestyle. Not so much the social aspect, because, as you will no doubt discover, I have no social skills and not much interest in cultivating them. I am an asshole.
What I've been missing is learning things.
"Mein gott! What kind of crazy talk is this?" you ask, because you're German.
Well, mein Liebling, the truth is, in my field of study - Philosophy, I was actually learning stuff that mattered to me. Stuff that explains... the sorts of things that normal people accept at face value. My favourite subject was metaphysics, and as can be assumed from the name, it talks about the way things work, rather than getting bogged down with all that boring math crap.

So, for the past year, I have been trying to stimulate my brain in an otherwise mind-numbing office environment by surfing wikipedia. I had already been harbouring dreams of publishing some kind of compendium of "all the things that I know to be true," - something in the style of those 18th and 19th century philosophers who thought they were all that and a bag of carp (many of them had moustaches!).
Why would I want to do that, when others had done it already? Well, as it turned out (and here's one of the reasons that I am not a social animal), "all the things that I hold to be true" are radically divergent from all the things that everyone else thinks to be true.

So, combining wikipedia's information and my deductive reasoning, sometime last year I started writing that compendium, so that others could read it and summarily be converted to my way of thinking - or, you know, tell me to fuck off.

Here's the point I've not been coming to: I'm going to start posting hunks of that compendium to this blog. Up to this point, it has been languishing in a 30 page Word file on a USB key. Soon it will be stagnating in the void that is the Internet.

For your better understanding, here is a basic rundown of the way that these posts will work:

1. The title - This will generally take the form of "On blank:" denoting that a) i will be discussing something, and b) that something will be blank.

2. Required reading - This will usually be a wikipedia link, or a link to a previous entry that you'll want to read in advance, so you know what the heck I'm talking about. I will try not to use this much, and actually explain new stuff as I go.

3. The words -I will do my best to describe "the things that I hold to be true." It won't be very academic. I'm not just restating other people's ideas. I am forcing their ideas to have sex, and then running off with their babies. I've done my best to translate academic language into English. Sometimes, it'll be something heavy like religion, other times it'll be something dumb like why I sometimes think I hear music when I'm standing in a crowd. I've also got pages and pages about time travel. I'm a geek.

4. Recommended reading - this will be the stuff to read if you're hardcore. I'll list books you should read if you really want to get up to your ears in junk that I barely scratch the surface of.


Feel free to poke holes in my ideas. I'm only posting this stuff on the recommendation of someone else.