The Beginning

I really hate deadlines. A lot. As a sophomore in college, I have had to deal with paper deadlines since the 6th grade or so, and probably will have to for at least another 2 years (or until I win the lottery). What that has meant for me is 7 1/2 years of waiting until the last minute to do a paper, sitting down at the computer and watching as my brain oozes out of my ears and runs as far away as it possibly can. A shame, really, and certainly not unique to myself. But I have begun to fear that this mode of writing papers has actually had a detrimental effect on how I write and--more importantly--how I think. It seemed to me that the best remedy for this malady was to actually start writing about things that I want to write about, and hopefully wow millions of readers worldwide in the process. This blog is about me learning how to write well. So I apologize in advance if I happen to slip in a word that just does not make sense (I've always wanted to use "selfsame" in a sentence), or try to use a metaphor that falls flat. 

That being said, writing, and good writing in particular, is done with a goal in mind. And my goal for this blog is not singularly to be able to write, but also to communicate some fairly weighty ideas. So I suppose I can sum up the subject of the blog as this: adventures in middle class revolutionaryism. Yes, I'm aware revolutionaryism is not a word, thank you big red underlines. What I mean by that title is: I am a 20 year old college student in a middle class upstate New York college, and I work in a revolutionary socialist organization. In fact, I am a revolutionary socialist. So while I advocate for a working class revolution, I am situated in an institution full of people whose values are highly separated from my own ideas, and I am somewhat separated from the working class myself. I come from a middle class background as well, so while most of my political ideas are those of Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist ideology, I come from a town whose public high school regularly sends students to each Ivy League university. Quite a divide indeed. I hope that through this blog, I can show that perspective, through analysis of news and commentary on the conditions right around where I live and go to school. And if in doing that I develop at least one or two interested readers, then I think I will have succeeded in both of my goals.

So, with all that out of the way: Welcome.