The other day, I was hanging out with my housemates, two of whom just moved here from New Hampshire in the spring. They were asserting that there is a lot of open space in New Hampshire, and that they didn’t understand why people thought the East Coast was so crowded. I immediately cruised over to Wikipedia and we spent the next 20 minutes investigating the population densities of each of the states.
The take away message? Don’t move to New Jersey if you want personal space. And yes, New Hampshire is quite a bit less dense than most of the rest of New England, but if you compare it to almost any of the western states, its still pretty dense. In fact, its almost five times as dense as Oregon, where we live now. Although I suppose that’s not entirely fair, since the whole eastern half of Oregon is essentially unpopulated, bringing down the average for the whole state.
So, whats the point of this vignette? Well, for one, I am a big fan of wikipedia. But more significantly, after researching the density of various states, one of my two housemates said to me, “you know Matt, you should really write down all the stuff your constantly researching – its all pretty fascinating and I’m sure a lot of people would be interested in what you wrote.”
I’ve thought before about starting a blog, but for some reason this time when it was suggested I suddenly felt inspired. And that’s why this is here. So what am I going to do with this blog? The plan is to write about whatever the hell I find interesting. Generally this will probably include quite a bit about environmental health, politics (at least for the next few weeks), sustainability, and quality of life.
More specifically, I’m planning on writing a lot about why I do the things that I do, and why I think other people do the things they do. Hence the title. For those who have a general meaning in their heads, but can’t exactly pin down the meaning of predicated, the Merriam Webster dictionary lists as a definition for the verb “to predicate”: “To assert a quality, attribute, or property.” Roget’s New Thesaurus lists: “To provide a basis for.”
I like both these definitions. Therefore, a predicated life to me is a life with an asserted basis – with a reason behind it. I’m not just going to do things because everybody else does them. I want to know exactly why I should do something, why other people are or aren’t doing it. And if I’m going to go to the trouble to figure out a ‘why’ that makes sense to me, I might as well write it down so anyone else who is interested can read it, right?
