Introduction to me.

The hardest part of starting is starting.  I dread the ususal "this is my first blog post" style of personal essay, because most of what that is about is the blooger's attempt to lose the self-conscious aspect of thinking their thoughts are actually interesting enough to someone else to write down.  After all, diaries still exist, don't they?

For me what I want to speak of are the big and small issues that affect me (us) every day, but I feel that some context is in order.  We live in the era of slanted news, after all, where who you get your news from is more important than what that news is.  This is not new, as I would like to cover later, but it is important to me that you (reader, whoever you are) know that I do not support any particular political party and I like to think that I can be objective about what is going on in our world.

Of course that last phrase is a hard one to live up to.  I am a married father of two girls, have lived my whole life in and around the city of Ottawa, I'll be forty years old next year (aaargh!), and I am a small business owner.  Add those things together and obviously I already have a way of looking at the world.  I call myself a small-c conservative, if that helps.  I am interested in politics but not political maneuvering or the minutiae of daily political "news cycles".  I think elections matter, although I don't think any one person (Rob Ford, Stephen Harper, Obama) can screw up the world any worse than it already is.  I believe in the pendulum effect when it comes to life, as in, what gets worse this year will get better next year, but I am worried that I am wrong (another topic I want to cover soon).  I believe that the world of today (post-2008 economic disaster, pre-2011 crash or recovery) is at a tipping point and things are about to get a whole lot worse before they get better. 

One other thing:  I don't plan to share this with anyone until I get a few posts under my belt, so if this small post doesn't float your boat, remember, the hardest part of starting something is actually starting it.