As is the way with all New Years resolutions the world over my ‘blog resolution’ to keep the updates constant and regular has failed miserably. This failure is due to many reasons not least of which is that I can’t quite mentally justify taking the time to write a blog post when I have a daunting (and ever increasing) amount of work to do every week to keep up with my university studies. This has resulted in the blog being totally neglected over the past few months… but despite this it has not been totally forgotten. In fact, I’ve found that over the past few months I’ve become increasingly aware that I really miss writing for pleasure about the things that intrigue and interest me.

When I started blogging it was primarily because I wanted to make sure that while I was working in a relatively dull office job I had some motivation to keep reading studies and research relevant to my academic interests and to create a record of  my thoughts and research that I could go back and refer to if I ever needed/wanted to. Of course it was not an entirely private endeavour and I also hoped that at least some others would read the posts, find something worthwhile and occasionally leave comments telling me what they thought about the topic or my perspective.

One thing I had not been prepared for was that blogging could have any kind of significant impact or that it could introduce you to an entirely new community of people. My experience with the Simon Singh case and subsequent meetings with fellow UK skeptics woke me up to these possibilities and are now a significant motivation for getting back on the blogging horse.

My main motivation however is that I have decided that the best way to try and avoid blogging from interfering with my studies is to try and make it a part of my study. Two of the three things this blog is supposed to be about are anthropology and religion and I am currently studying ‘Cognitive & Evolutionary Anthropology‘ which involves reading papers every week about the cognitive science of religion! Writing a coherent description of research or topics necessarily requires that I actually have a coherent understanding of said research or tipic and so it seems entirely silly that I haven’t been using the blog as an opportunity to help me study and push what I am reading into my longer term memory!

I’m going to try and rectify that situation now and so I will begin blogging again from this week on. To give myself even fewer excuses I am also going to try and keep to a blogging schedule of just one post a week posted on Saturday. If I find myself with extra time or something terribly interesting happens I may write more but one post a week- with my current schedule- seems like a perfectly feasible target so that’s what I’m going to aim for.

So that’s that… I’m back and there is nothing anyone can do about it!