Welcome to my blog!

So I have decided to start a blog. I am not sure if anyone who isn't related to me - or even people who are related to me - will read it on a regular basis but I am doing it anyway. I am sure you are wondering why. There isn't really a simple or single answer but since you are taking the time to read this, I owe you an answer.

The first reason is jealousy. Several months ago my wife started her own blog. She did it with a very specific purpose - to share her thoughts and chronicle our life as we started the process of adopting a baby from Korea. By all measures it has been an incredibly successful endeavor. It is popular among our family and friends and it has connected Kelly to an incredible community of other Korean adoption families (more on that community will come in later posts). She spends a lot of time working on it and gets enjoyment from it. I am jealous of her community, envious that she has an outlet for thoughts and feelings, and need something to do while she is posting.

The second reason is reconnecting with an old desire. While I never actively pursued it, periodically in my life I have had a desire to be an essayist or a columnist. The model in my mind was the old George Will columns that ran in the back of Newsweek or the Lexington and Bagehot columns that run in The Economist (not saying I agree with the opinions expressed in these forums but it was the model in my head). I wanted a forum to share my world view and opinions with people. I probably not a strong enough writer to have ever made this a career but blogging seems like a good outlet for my amateur aspirations.

The third reason is more personal. I want to create a personal archive of my thoughts about my life and about the world. Even if noone reads this it will be nice to able to look back and see how my world view has changed and evolved. It will interesting to pair my retrospective memory and opinion of events in the world and events in my life with the contemporaneous one.

So what can you expect as you read this? Honestly, I am not sure. It will probably end up with a hodge podge of political commentary, random observation, quasi-academic pontification, documentation of life events, and self-reflection.

Well, that's enough for introductions. On to the real content.

Welcome to the Wilderness of Jon's Mind!