When I was a kid, my friends and I used to love the Button Factory song. If you don’t know it, it goes something like this: “Hello, my name is Joe! And I work all day in a button factory. I have a house and a job and a family. One day, my boss said ‘Hey Joe, are you busy?’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Push this button with your left hand.'” And then we mimed pushing a button with our left hand. We repeated this many many times until all appendages, including heads and posteriors, were occupied pushing imaginary buttons or until we collapsed laughing; you can guess which was more often the case.
I think about this because of how simply Joe describes himself. His name, his occupation, and his most prized possessions: a simple description that many of us use when introducing ourselves to strangers we meet on the bus or to various family members of this month’s significant other. However, when you think about it, this is quite a shallow description. Is that who you really are? Or are they just facts that eventually become meaningless as you get to know a person better and uncover their true nature?
This train of thought was inspired by a blogging 101 challenge: introduce yourself and explain why you blog. It got me thinking about how I would describe myself and my purpose in randomly rambling here. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no simple explanation of who I am; instead, I’ll try to explain why I blog and hope that gives you some insight to my character. As they say, actions speak louder than words.
I love to inspire people to think. It’s part of my job as a teaching assistant, as a sister and daughter, and as a generally enthusiastic mathematician. There’s nothing more rewarding to me than seeing the cogs in someone’s brain churn as they try to reason out why on earth someone would do something, like bring a stuffed squid to class one day.
In addition, I also love to think myself. Often, there are multiple trains of thoughts going on in the background of my brain as I go about my daily life, processing whatever random topic I’m pondering and playing back my mental problem solving playlist of the day. There’s something just so intrinsically rewarding about looking at a piece of information from a new angle and drawing a conclusion that helps clarify life. I don’t have adequate words to explain it.
That’s why I blog. It’s a perfect combination of thinking out loud and inspiring others to think about the things I’m thinking about, or maybe something tangentially related to whatever I ramble about. I could just write it in a journal, but then others wouldn’t see my thoughts and ideas, and there’s still that little idealistic part of me that wants to make a difference in the world. Whether it’s through my writing or my teaching or my math, I don’t really care.
I just want to change the world.
Acorn for your thoughts 