Fighting Somnapathy

I've used the made up word "somnapathy" for several years now as a web handle. I don't know how or why I came up with the idea for the portmanteau. The word "somna" is Swedish for "to fall asleep" -- it meshed better than the Latin equivalent "soma" would have. And then the apathy part is pretty much self explanatory. I suppose I was probably in a state of somnapathy when I donned it -- I was probably fairly tired and I didn't much care about anything at the moment.

I've been meaning to come up with a better name for this blog than the placeholder "Just Thoughts," and I kept coming back to this idea of somnapathy. And how it's actually a very dangerous state. We all come by it here and there, particularly when we're not particularly busy, or have perhaps just finished being particularly busy. It happened to me a lot as an undergrad, as I imagine is quite common.

When I started this blog I didn't want it to just be a bloggy blog where I talked about mundane details or ranted about my life -- I wanted to make it about something. But at the same time I didn't want to make that something so specific that it would constrain what I could or could not say here. It's a problem I've been kicking around half seriously for a few days now, and as a result I have come up with the new title as seen above.

Fighting Somnapathy.

Because in the end, the most valuable use this blog can have is to be productive. So if I want to dig into climate change and report my findings, I can do that here. If I want to rant about the current state of the space program and its place in the federal budget, I can do that here. If I want to fool around with data and make charts and graphs and maps, I can do that too. And even if nobody sees it, I'll still feel like my whims will have been sufficiently productive.