White Space

What beautiful fonts! This website wants to make my words pretty-- it's politely requesting that I write. I want to help you, website, I really do! I want to populate your copious style sheets with content, to bring you a community of paragraphs that stretch from top to bottom. I will try.
Getting started writing again means straining the words from the brain talk and fixing them up so they fit on a page nicely. The "writing" thoughts and the "thinking" thoughts are different. I won't talk about it anymore; I don't know about brains, I only own one.
Oh, and this is going to be a Personal Blog! I'm going to talk about Me sometimes. I'll talk about where I live, and what I do, and what kinds of things other people want me to do. It'll be fun!
A few years ago I was afraid to write about that kind of thing, because I was afraid people would analyze me and discover that I am a terrible loser and a charlatan just like everybody else. I know better now-- no one cares! Anyway, if someone does they'll email me and then I'll get to have a flame war.
You might have noticed I used "they" as a third person singular pronoun in my last sentence. That was intentional. I think it's a good idea-- people do it in other languages and they do it for a reason. Speaking about a person using the gender specific third person pronoun is just that-- specific. Specificity causes offense sometimes: "Do you think Gregory is still sleeping with the Argentinian midget?" is more specific, and more offensive, than "Are they still together?" If old Greg is listening by chance, he's much more likely to cock his head and listen to the former statement than the latter.
When you listen to a conversation, you try to figure out who the speakers are speaking about; if they use gender to specify the third party then you know the gender of the subject. That information can be very, well, informative-- which isn't so great if you don't want people who aren't in on the conversation to know what you're talking about.