Beginning

I'm not sure how to begin a blog. I suppose I will resort to quoting someone else. That's what we do, right? We learn through imitation. I think about the play therapy I've studied; about children sorting out their feelings through imitation in knee-high kitchen sets or with stiff-armed Barbie-moms holding stiff-necked Barbie-babies. Skinner and Vygotsky would agree. "Through others, we become ourselves". Chomsky would contest, soft-spokenly suggesting the innate. I am not sure if autonomous thought is a farce or the only real thing (or more probably, neither...or both), but in either case, I am not there yet. Not bold enough to share my mediocre thoughts so independently. Instead, I use my stiff-versed Barbie-Hugo as a proxy to help me sort out my fascination with social work and social networking. For that, I will even forgive him his masculine pronouns.

"Nothing is more terrifying than contemplation of (a person's conscience). Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul. To make a poem of the human conscience, even in terms of a single man and the least of men, would be to merge all epics in a single epic transcending all. Conscience is the labyrinth of illusion, desire, and pursuit of the furnace of dreams, the repository of thoughts of which we are ashamed; it is the pandemonium of sophistry, the battlefield of passions. To peer at certain moments into the withdrawn face of a human being in the act of reflection, to see something of what lies beyond their outward silence is to discern struggle on a Homeric scale, conflicts of dragons and hydras, aerial hosts as in Milton, towering vistas as in Dante. The infinite space that each man caries within himself, wherein despairingly he contrasts the movements of his spirit with the acts of his life, is an overpowering thing."

~Victor Hugo, Les Miserables