Who am I? Why am I here?

All this blank space. And it's all mine. Again.

I had a blog once, for quite a while back when blogs were new enough that they were never commercial. That first one started as an undergraduate project.At the time I contributed to it often, on all kinds of topics related to thinking through theory and student life and the challenges of working while studying. Eventually, as things happen, my life changed in big and small ways and blogging wasn't part of it anymore. Consequently, my little blog lay fallow and was left to become yet another piece of digital litter.

But I never stopped thinking about the idea of blogging. I watched friends start their own blogs. I saw facebook incorporating blog feeds. I heard about how blogs had helped this academic's career or that student's thought processes. And friends pushed me to start a blog again, so they'd have a place to link to when they referred to me here and there in their own digital ramblings.

Then people started googling me. Not sure why, but recently I've been getting emails from a few different places that track such things (like Academia.edu) letting me know that people were looking for me. Thing is, anyone looking for me was getting very little back for their search terms.

I'm going to try to change that. The timing seems right. I'm just starting to write my MA thesis, and so I'm working through a lot of things related to the business of academic life and to the process of writing an MA project. I'm a theory geek, so I'm reading a lot too and things are starting to percolate up and out of those readings. I've also started trying to get myself out into the local academic community. Various presentaitons I've attended recently got my brain all fired up. With no one locally (yet) to talk this stuff over with, it seems that the need for a blog is mounting.

So here I am. Here it is. I'm hoping that on these digital pages, I can explore and think through what is it to be who I am.

Who am I? I am Tamara Paradis. In shorthand cliches, I'm an academic, a gamer, a Masters student, a theory geek, a sociologist, a digital person.

What am I? What I am mostly these days is lost in thought, trying to think through a myriad of clashing concepts and ideas and possibilities.

So this blog will be my way of trying to find myself through my thinking and let others find me too.

The hope is that rather than being lost in my thoughts, I can be found in thought.