The intro, the hardest pill to swallow.

I was born in 1985, with the computer in its own infancy.  In the 90's, the internet was no longer just an interesting idea.  It went from to something the geeks had, to something the enviable households had, to something you were expected to have very quickly.  My mom signed us up just as everybody else was joining in, and my little brother actually led me in exploring it (I was more of a paperback book guy).  I was suddenly an obnoxiously talkative friend to have on AIM.  I laughed at all the silly MySpace sites, but when an early adopter friend introduced me to Facebook, suddenly I was stuck on the bandwagon.  And somehow despite all the social networking and online gaming (I've avoided WoW, thank god) I starting really loving the internet for the connection to the communal pool of knowledge, which I'm pretty sure was the point in the first place.

Hmmm.

I'm gonna square with ya.  The internet is not the center of my life.  When I was trying to find a name for a title, it turned out all my first choices were taken.  Yeah, the net is a major influence on me - I'm chained by e-mail, I obsessively check all my RSS feeds, and Apple holds disturbing sway over my budget.  But it's all just about information (and music).  So now, I get an idea, and I have to go off on it.  I rant a bit.  Kinda like Scott Adams, minus the comics and fame and career.

It's a developmental stage, an experimental stage I'm going through.  The need to put words to all those pesky feelings flying around my brain.  To understand everything.

My ambition is to be a chef and a thinker.  My purpose in being a chef is a) to produce amazing food, b) to achieve that Zen-like happiness you can get when you cook or just maintain a whole restaurant at a standard of perfection, and c) to make money to support myself while I pursue my real ambition.  Which is what I'm doing right now.

I firmly believe that we've lost our sense of purpose as a race, that we have no shared ambition.  We all focus on our individual lives, making ourselves happy.  And maybe I'm naive, but I think if we don't take the proper action, we'll stagnate and go extinct.  My purpose would be to work out exactly what we should be doing, and then inspire people to follow my lead.  So my work on the "thinker" side of my life would be dedicating to blogging, spreading my ideas, and just generally becoming recognized as the smartest person around.

I know, ridiculously ambitious for someone who so far has no following or experience.  We'll see if we can fix that.

Ok, so there's the intro.  Let's not repeat that.