Sunday in the blog with Sriram

"Are you writing about events and people from memory, or do you look things up?" she asked about my blogging.

A fair question.

But, I didn't have to think much about it.

"It is mostly memory recall.  But, I do use Google in order to do my own fact checking.  I do not do any research like what students do in order to write papers, if that's your question."

I like to think that she was impressed.

I suppose like most writers, even this wannabe writer writes only about what he knows about.  I wish my English teachers, particularly in the high school level, had helped us understand that our essays need not be about grand narratives. If only they had suggested that essays could even be about the grocery store, or about an accident while bicycling, anything as small and part of everyday life that we knew and experienced in plenty.  Without guidance, I fumbled around and even got slapped silly!

Of course, her question about memory recall was not about blog-posts that draw on my personal life experiences.  Google does not know what happened in my ninth grade classroom or at my grandma's home in 1973.  At least not yet.  Who knows where technological advancements will lead us to.

What about when the post is about, say, something that was triggered by the rise of a man with Indian origins to political power in a country that once colonized the lands where his ancestors lived?  Such a post involves a lot of facts, and there's only so much that a rapidly aging middle-aged brain can recall, right?

In the old, old days, when we wanted to know something, we might have walked up to the elders around us and asked them the questions for which we sought the answers.  Almost always, the elders didn't know and they bullshitted.  But, we didn't know any better and took their answers as the truth.  There was no Google back then to do any real-time fact-checking!  

One reader, who was a colleague for years, knows well my distaste for bullshit and bullshitters, which I talked about--a lot--with students. She was so fascinated by my constant talking about Bullshit that she invited me to talk with her class.  A music class!  I did.  Students loved it.  After that, I was re-invited, more than a couple of times.  Talking about Bullshit is darn exciting!

A few years ago, when I came across a link to write up bogus job descriptions, I crafted this bogus description for myself and, of course, tweeted it:

How did I track that down?  Easy.  Because I remembered that I had tweeted something along those lines and had blogged about it.  Which is why I told her, "actually, before I go to Google, I search my own blog first."

(Go ahead, try for yourself by typing a search word in the box in the upper left corner of the blog and keep yourself entertained by reading old posts, especially whenever I take a break from blogging.)

The larger question anybody might have is also a straightforward one: Why blog?  Ahem, I already wrote about that! 😇