my new blog

i have, more or less, completely ignored the rise of blogging culture to its now ubiquitous status. i suppose this is somewhat unexpected for someone who grew up in front of a computer screen. i distinctly remember my brother and i custom building a "massive" server computer during my freshman year of high school (1999) featuring an impressive array of three internal hard drives (amounting to about 20GB) and housing the highest quality, most diverse collection of crust punk known to the net at the time. g.b.h., total chaos, i farm, the criminals... you know, only the true musical geniuses. we ran a server on a file sharing network called "hotline", a precursor to clients like napster and others of this ilk. i am actually appalled at the inability of the current p2p clients to even remotely rival the amazing atmosphere of hotline, which involved logging on to different servers (our musical boutique was found in the hotline search engine under the title PUNK PUNK PUNK... three times like that just to add some credibility and to scare away confused ska-punks). new visitors then engaged the hosts (my brother and i) to strike up a deal to gain membership to the server. this usually entailed uploading an album that we didn't already have. it was a beautiful ethic... stealing music cooperatively. we initially ran it off a 56k modem and generally were happy to download one or two albums in a 24 hour period. 

anyway, the point is that i should have been blogging years ago but somehow miraculously defied my near-certain fate (or rather deferred it for a few years).  however, i am already enjoying the benefits of being a late-comer. on a whim i decided to start this blog and had it registered within about 2 minutes (it took a little longer than expected because my first 15 options for a url were already taken). i called it panaceas. virtually all permutations of the root word, panacea, were taken so i resulted to the plural.

panacea: a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases

i encountered this word for the first time in a reading in one of my classes two weeks ago. the article's author, elinor ostrom, is a famed institutional theorist. she has established a framework called the IAD (institutional analysis and development) in order to better understand the way in which human interactions are structured. in my weekly rebuttal to our readings i struggled to accept a framework that attempts to compartmentalize human interactions into neat little boxes with such names as "exogenous variables", "participants", "action arena", "outcomes", etc. it seems far too rational. in a way, i suppose, this is what i want to to do with this blog: write about some of the chaos i am confronted with on a daily basis and explore the ways in which i am changed because of it. it is impossible to make sense of it all. with any luck, i plan to write about a small sliver on the stimuli i encounter that provoke my thoughts. if it entertains anyone other than myself then i suppose that is an added bonus. :]