Holst was lazy and prolific

So, I just saw my fiance play with a choral group that played something by Gustav Holst...and it had the same tune as part of Jupiter from the planets. Does that mean that Holst was lazy? Or was he just resourceful (gee, this is a good tune, I think I'll use it again sometime)?

Early in the morning

I know that it isn't really that early...it's after 9:00, after all. It feels early, though. That is because I have awoken before Anna, and when she was awake briefly, she was very confused and out of it. On a typical morning, she is up before me, and she is quite hyper and excited to be up, while I am groggy and confused. Not today, though. I was not hyper, but also was not groggy. I had had this strange dream, involving my old van that broke down almost five years ago, my family's lake cabin, and my parents church. The strangest part of the dream was that I was sitting in the choir loft at my parents church, except the chairs had been replaced by regular pews, and I was opening some mail that had been sent to my parent's address. The mail included about four hundred dollars in checks that various people had sent to me, and I accidentally dropped the entire stack of mail, but I couldn't find it no matter how hard I looked on the floor. Possibly the strangest part of all this was that the entire time I was in the choir loft, there was a major holiday church service going on around me, and some how it was okay for the choir to help me look for the dropped mail, as long as no one knew about all the checks that were missing.

Weird.

Why is it important to write

I think that writing is one of the most important things that a person can do. In time, almost everything that a person does disappears, except for what they write. The oldest civilizations in the world left a jumble of confusing relics, that contain mostly ambiguous meanings. Light is shed on ancient peoples to a far greater degree when they have developed a higher level of literacy. The oldest cuneiform tablets are just lists of goods traded, and shed little light on anything other than the economic lives of their writers. Eventually things like Hammurabi's code, and the Epic of Gilgamesh shed some light on the legal and mythological systems of the period.

In other civilizations, writing became more advanced, with works such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with its detailed instructions for mummification and burial, or in the tragedies and philosophical writings of ancient Greece, as well as the works of Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides. By the time of Christ, the world was lousy with things people wrote down, and even though only a small fraction of that material still exists, we know a great deal about the ancient world because of it. As history catches up with the present, more and more writings exist, until 1453 AD, when the movable type printing press was invented, after which time, nearly anyone could publish just about whatever they wanted to, provided that they had the will and the economic means to do so.

In todays age of the interweb, that is still true, but now all that you need is a computer and an internet connection, and you can put whatever you care to share out there for anyone who cares to read it. Many people even use blogs, just like this one. The difference between most of those people and me is that they think that people actually care what they have to say. I'm just trying to practice writing and purge all the stored up crap that is preventing me from writing all the stuff in my head that I think that people might actually care about someday.

Trying to post more

So, I was watching this video on the interweb the other day. It had Ira Glass in it. I think the intended audience was aspiring film makers, but he said some things that resonated with me as well. Basically the idea was that if you want to be good at an art form, you have to do it a lot to get all the crap out of your system. I took it to mean that if I want to be a writer, I have to be more concerned with writing a lot of stuff, before I can worry about the quality of what I am writing. The idea, I think, is that practice makes perfect, and the more I write, the more practice I will have. Therefore, I am going to try to start blogging more. Then I will be getting more practice. I don't know what I will write about, but I think I will just try to write about things that I think are interesting. I suppose that could lead to being an essayist or something, right?