What the Blog?!?

I'm sure ten million blog posts around the English-speaking world have started with that title, and that rightfully so. I'm in sort of a silly mood. I was going to set my status on Facebook as "Josh is... aspiring?" But it didn't quite sum up all of the weird nuances of goofiness. But if I could have an unlimited number of status messages at once, thus more accurately reflecting the convoluted complexity of human emotion, they might go something like this....

Josh is... aspiring?
Okay, you already knew about this one. But, what the blog could it mean?? Such a riddle I will now propound for you: Josh is aspiring to do something downright excellent with his life. Yes indeed, he's aspiring to awesomeness. Josh is aspiring to be some sort of freelance open-source software dude. Or, to be a non-freelance, Google-employed open-source software dude. To finish his rapidly developing program that facilitates merging of family history records. Along with that, he's aspiring to be an author. Of what? Well, what does an author auth? Poems, Short stories, Commentary. Novels. Screenplays. Treatises. Blog entries. Cryptic things in French that people will later quote but not understand.

One who aspires is an aspirant. What is the thing aspired to? Ah yes, an aspiration.

Josh is... chronicling his life.
There's a program on my computer called F-Spot. Anybody fortunate enough to be running any vaguely modern version of Ubuntu will have it, too. In F-Spot I can see all of my photos like you can in Picasa, but I can also add tags to them. Tags are just a label. It can be anything, from the names of the people in the picture, to an event that it was connected with, or whatever. I want to record the who and what of my photos while I still remember it.

I've also been typing up my journals onto the computer. This is a massive project. In the past 12 or 13 years I've amassed many hundreds of pages. Someday I want to assemble these and other random tidbits such as emails and chats into a compendium, an enormous volume documenting my life experiences. And it shall be called something strange such as Monstropoliton or Confessio Iosi or even Master of Hipness: 100 Classic Blasts from the Past. Yes, my own 10 volume chronicle of life, but even better than the chronicles of old, for mine shall be illustrated, or at least sprinkled with color images from the golden days of digital photography.

Josh is... transfixed by the awesomeness of cool music, old and new.
It's impossible to really describe the excitement, the elation, of discovering a bit of music that -- simply put -- does something for you. Music has been an important part of my life ever since I first greased up the slide of my trombone 12 or so years ago (seems to be about when my journal writing started.) Sadly, since high school my love affair with music has suffered some tragic relational neglect. Not only have I ceased to play in any performing groups, but I've largely ceased to discover anything new to listen to, to receive inspiration and ideas from. As awesome as Fresh Aire VI is, it can only get you so far beyond the first decade of frequent listening.

But, in the last year or two there has been a bit of a reawakening within me as I've picked up the guitar a bit and found some new sources like Buena Vista Social Club -- truly the first jazz or jazz-esque music I've found so supremely worth listening to since I first became acquainted with both Chuck Mangione and the legends of big band an entire age ago -- or from the most recent wave of Amazon gift certificate purchases, La Oreja de Van Gogh and The Decembrists.

Josh is... going to work!
Yeah, better earn me some summertime moolah to keep food on the ol' table and prevent dog days boredom. So, I'm off to engineer language features and tweak statistical models! I'll have to report on my Independence Day activities later. Take care!