Names

I'm not sure how many people will recognize the name of my blog. Considering how few people figure out my email address (a.yellow.wood@gmail.com, from the first line in The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost), I'm guessing not too many.

The phrase is from an ee cummings poem named "anyone lived in a pretty how town," which is probably my favorite poem, and one of about a dozen I have memorized. I won't post the full text here, but you should follow this link and read the whole thing, because it is delightful. If it completely baffles you (like most ee cummings poems do on first reading), here is a good concise analysis of it.

I've always liked this line, and I've always wanted to continue my poem theme-naming (starting with my email address), so that is what I named my blog. If I were being a really dedicated fan, the title wouldn't be capitalized, but I tried it that way, and don't like how it looks. I did, however, leave the caption below the title un-capitalized, so I'm not completely unfaithful to the original.

Why Blogging?

You see, I took an Honors Civilizations class this semester, and hated it. A large portion of the class involved a group blog. We had to do a large blog post every week, comment on others' posts every day, and we never got any warning about what crazy project they would make us do next. And some of them were crazy. Like,  for one of my midterms I spent a total of about 7 hours one week carving ancient symbols into a piece of rock (plus several hours researching said symbols).  I just finished the class yesterday, and am super, super happy.

The thing is, the blogging grew on me.

All during the semester I kept thinking of these fun posts I could do, but I couldn't do them on my class blog because we got graded for that. Now that I am free of my graded obligations, I thought I might start a personal blog and be able to post some of the things I want to talk about.
(another thing I hated about the class. They kept telling us we were supposed to have self directed learning, and research what we want to, except they then gave us a whole bunch of restrictions on what we were allowed to do)