Here we go!

You know how you sometimes surprise myself?

Well, there I was, trying to help a friend with a paper on "Material Culture." I was reading it over to offer some suggestions, when suddenly I was like--wow! this section is beautifully written:

"There has always been a philosophical and ideological element to the study of history, and despite all the statistics and analysis...archaeology is not enough of a science to escape the bedrock of its discipline . Whenever archaeology deals with sites of major historical importance it is going to be the material hand of history, not a separate, objective discipline." Lovely! Couldn't have put it better myself. Then I realized--it was myself. It was a quote from an e-mail exchange we had had about her paper.

After an embarrassing but pleasing self pat-on-the-back, I thought--why don't I always write like that? Speak on e-mail and it pours out effortlessly: an elegant, succinct formulation of a complex idea. If I were writing my own paper--hours of agonized dithering, frozen by a blank screen, over-writing and re-writing. And of course by the time I'd have tortured out my poor paragraph, the idea would have been lost.

The key was to catch the idea as it developed, thinking of it as conversation:

Ta-da! Blog.

I'd been thinking of blogging ever since I got home to behin the long process of trying to find my feet again. I thought at the time--this would be easier if I could track each step, rather than feeling lost, if I could talk to other people going through the same thing.

But thinking is not--alas--doing, and its been months while the idea languished somewhere in the back reaches of my mind to be dusted off occasionally in brief spurts of conversation.

Now after meeting my writing through the back door, I'm taking the plunge. To real time conversation, to catching our thoughts, and to finding our feet...