"Do you have a life?"

"I read your latest post at the blog" a student said as he was heading out.  "Looks like you blog a lot."

I nodded my head as he continued with a smile, "even about your haircut."  Ah, yes, about that $9.99 haircut.

"I was thinking that the professor has lots of time."

 I gave him my usual spiel of how my work is also my hobby and how, therefore, I don't find blogging to be any time consuming work at all as much as I don't find my work to be time consuming either.

"But, you have a life, like family and a life, right?"

That is a difficult question for me to answer.  Because, "life" includes blogging and doing everything else that I do now.

Except during my undergraduate days, when I did very little reading because of the crappy library that my college had, I have always spent (wasted?) time reading and thinking.  Before college, during my school days, I was keen on reading anything other than the regular textbooks, which always made my mother wonder when I ever prepared for exams.  She is right; I rarely did anything that would qualify as serious exam prep work.

In graduate school, I thought I had died and gone to heaven with the awesome libraries on campus.  Yes, in the plural.  Multiple libraries.  I had a tough time choosing my favorites.  There was my favorite spot in the reading room at Doheny:

USC Doheny Library, summer 2009

Or a table by the large glass windows at VKC.  Or the quaint furniture at the philosophy library.  I can imagine that my life would have been super-awesome if only the web and blogging had been invented back then!

Life is what we make of it.  How I enjoy life might not appeal to the next person.  When my cousin was visiting with me a few weeks ago, she felt that my life was too regimented with what I eat and don't eat, and with the walking that I do, and the relatively mess-free home that I maintain.  "Get a life" she said.  "It is ok to be messy, you know."

Reading and thinking and writing naturally led me to write opinion pieces.  Back in Bakersfield, as the newspaper started publishing my pieces, I felt encouraged and perhaps even started flooding the editor's mailbox with my writings.  Blogging would have helped, a lot!  There were a few in the community who even asked me if I worked for the newspaper!

After moving to Oregon, it took me a while to get oriented to the new environs.  Though neighbors, California and Oregon are very different.  Bakersfield's San Joaquin Valley is a world away from the Willamette Valley where I now live.  Once I got a sense of the rhythm of this place, I was off to the races, as they say.

Even in my first year in Oregon, I invited a couple of my faculty colleagues to contribute to my blog.  I was convinced that the more contributors I had, the more we could influence discussions.  But, in retrospect, their decision not to blog--neither with me nor anywhere else--is a telling example of how differently my thoughts are compared with theirs as has been in pretty much everything else at work.

So, when the student asked whether I have a life, all I could do was smile and nod.  There is no way I could have provided such a lengthy explanation, and there is no way in hell that he would have patiently listened to all these either; let us see if he read this ;)