I can’t avoid the feeling that writing on this blog is an incredibly egoistic activity. I want to tell you about myself. About my opinions. About a story I dreamt up. All of it’s about me.

Now I can, and maybe should, concede that this is the nature of writing. That you can fundamentally only write something original based on your own thoughts, knowledge, opinions, and refections. I suppose there is a very real possibility that writing is itself egoistic. And unless one writes very corporate prose to mask that fact, it will always appear that way to the reader.

Even if one endeavors to write in a way that isn’t directly about about themselves, there’s no denying that any attempt at defining the external requires is defining the internal as well. All criticism, for example, is inherently based on the critic’s experiences, preferences, and understandings of culture. Academic writing, as well, is imbued with the prejudices of its authors. Few modern scholars would dare to write a defense of slavery as a social good because none of them believes such an argument to be true (with the possible exception of James Watson, but that’s another matter entirely).

Despite my intellectual understanding of this, I can’t help but bristle a little every time my fingers reach for the shift+i combination. It feels so self-important to do that repeatedly. To contend, whether intentionally or not, that I am important enough to have some say in the cultural discourses about which I comment.

I am absolutely convinced that I am not the smartest person in the world. Nor am I the most interesting or consistent in my opinions. But sometimes, as I write, I feel as if I am making that exact argument.

And it’s not that I think I’m completely uninteresting, but I don’t think I have the diverse opinions or rhetorical skills necessary to consistently be both interesting and or entertaining.

I’m not sure what all this rambling means. Perhaps it’s merely me coming to terms with the reality of the situation. Perhaps it’s me wishing to apologize for, well, writing. Perhaps it’s me giving voice to my self-doubt. Perhaps it’s me wishing that I was more people saying more things.

Maybe the point is simply this: Thanks for reading. In the past, present, and future.

Where it now stands, Frozen Toothpaste has been online at this address for a little more than two months. So perhaps it’s too early to do something that the President only does annually. But then, this blog is much younger than this country, and I don’t need primetime network TV space to give a State of the Blog.

The first thing you’ll probably now notice, if you’re returning, is that this blog looks different. That’s no mistake; I’ve spent the last few days recalling what little I’ve ever known about web design to modify a theme by the illustrious Chris Pearson, making it do most of the things I wanted it to. And though I’ll admit to a little melancholy at dropping my old theme, I’m confident that this one is at least pi-times better.

Though I initially had no idea what I was going to use this space for, I’ve found that I tend to focus on a few topics, which are now reflected in this blog’s subtitle (or whatever name you wish to give that thing).

Also, as you may have noticed, I’ve recently scaled back the publishing schedule here from two posts per day, as an unstated norm, to one. This was done for no other reason than sheer laziness. Simply, I felt I spent too much of my time worrying about what I could or would write to fill two posts.

I’ve been finding one per day much easier to accomplish in part because I’ve created an informal schedule that aids my decisions about what the heck to talk about. The rough schedule is:

• Monday: Review, of just about anything I feel is worth telling the world about.
• Tuesday: Life, something either mundane or important but usually relating to the day-to-day.
• Wednesday: Politics/World, usually either something interesting I’ve noticed or something I feel a need to comment on.
• Thursday: Pretty Much Whatever I Want.
• Friday: Other People’s Words (OPW), poems or quotations that say things I’d like to say better than I can.

My purpose in telling you that schedule is not to be held to it, but to give you, as a reader, a rough idea of what you can expect. I’m not going to hold myself to keeping that schedule, and nor are the categories discrete. Sometimes a review will no doubt deal in politics, I’m not going to avoid such things merely because you think I’m supposed to.

I think I’ve covered all the bases, though there is still this: Thank you, dear reader.