Launching the Suburban Family Guy Blog

When I was at doing my MBA at Columbia, I sat with many friends (in a place we self-effacingly called "Slackers Row") near the back of the classroom listening, taking notes, and occasionally instant-messaging and tweaking our Fantasy Sports rosters.  I wasn't like "Mitch", who was brilliant and would constantly raise his hand and offer pithy comments.  I wasn't even like my friend Henry, who would offer insightful comments every now and then.  I was one of the guys who hardly spoke up unless the professor cold-called me or I was slated to "breakdown" a Harvard Business School case to open the class.  To be clear, my grades were fine, thank you very much.

This is what I think happened: I entered business school being relatively young compared to my new classmates, and that caused me to be a little more reticent that usual (people who know me would attest that I rarely run out of things to say or opine on).  Once that tone was set, I felt increasing pressure that if I was going to raise my hand and share something with my classmates, these self-styled future masters of the the universe, it better be earth-shattering and brilliant, something along the lines of a Nobel Prize-quality economic corollary or an iron-clad challenge to the Markowitz capital markets theory.  Otherwise, my classmates might look at each other incredulously and say, "We waited two semesters and two months for that?" Unfortunately, that moment of enlightenment never came, and I remained the quiet classmate.

In a similar vein, I've held off on starting a blog.  Well, at least that's one reason.  A few years, my friend Victor asked me if I blogged.  As I was under the impression that he was actually doing so, I said (with a smile), "No, I'm not so arrogant and self-important to think that someone actually cares to read my musings."  I still believe that, by the way.  I don't write for an audience - I write to put convoluted thoughts on screen so it has an appearance of clarity.  It's cathartic.

And yes, there was the "My goodness, I've been holding out on blogging for such a long time, that I'd better come up with some heavy musings that would rival Plato, or at least Lee Huang's Urban Christian blog."  I think I've gotten over that.  My wife Sarah is a wonderful writer and I think she derives a lot of joy from blogging, and while she cares that people are edified by what she writes, I think simply the act of writing and organizing thoughts in the midst of her crazy life serves as an outlet for her spiritual and creative being. 

So my blog will be about anything and everything.  It's not going to be exclusively about my marriage (I think Sarah would have an issue with that), my kids, my faith, my sports teams, politics, my church, or my pop culture.  I just want to write.