Moving across the waters

I have kind of a strange job at the moment. I work for a major publishing house, but I don’t really have a lot to do. My boss has been gone for over a month, and when she’s not here, there’s really not much to do She is, however, a very nice person and seems to be very understanding of my dilemma. It feels somewhat churlish to complain about a job where I spend most of my time free to do what I want – read (both blogs and the Kindle PC app), kill time, write if I chose to, though up until now I have not chosen to do that. However, it can get to be pretty dull, and I’ve come to worry that, due to my advanced age and my all-too-apparent lack of skills, this job is an active drag on my life. I can probably spin a good game about what I’ve learned and accomplished here, but it will certainly not be entirely true.

But that statement up there, about the writing, is what brings me here. I used to post on another blog, Pseudo Body Politic, with a friend and that friend’s friend. That kind of fell to pieces once I came back from Peace Corps in Bulgaria and had to get a job. Drew and the other guy seem to have moved on to other things as well. It also didn’t help that, following the election in 2008 I became pretty disenchanted with politics in general. I’ve done that a couple of times when it’s become entirely apparent that democracy is, at a fundamental level, fairly flawed – at least when viewed as a rational means of determining social policy. Economic conditions and what political scientists call “fundamentals” (employment levels, interest rates, all sorts of stuff) are what actually determine election results. I’m sure that, on the margins, politicians themselves can help or (mostly) hurt themselves. But what it comes down to is, if the economy is going well, you’ll be reelected. If not, it’s time to find a lobbying job. That just isn’t much for me to hang my hat on.

So, realizing that I don’t have much interest in writing about politics (at least not as a principle project), I’ve decided that writing, by itself, should be something that I make an effort towards. But about what? Well, I certainly have a number of interests: reading, writing, movies, music and videogames, to name a few. Most likely, no one cares about my thoughts on these subjects, but, hey, when did that ever stop me from pontificating? At any rate, the idea of Quixote States is as a semi-private place for me to practice writing and expand upon things that have been interesting me of late.

With that in mind, this post is written to be more or less a place holder while I futz around with the design of the blog. I might come back and try and write something more later on today, but we’ll see. The goal, as I see it, is to try and put at least one thing up each day. We’ll see where that gets me.