sheer potentiality

The blog is now in Wordpress. Yeah, I’m using a boring default style. With a few tweaks. When I feel like it I’ll prettify it more or change styles.

Not only am I now a YouTube celebrity, apparently my blog has become the new location for the loosely controlled chaos of Jacqueline Passey’s comment threads. Alright, guys. If you’re going to start commenting over here, here are some simple rules:

• This is my blog. This is “sheer potentiality” on philwelch.net. You’re lucky if I update weekly. If there’s a thriving comment community I may be inspired to update more often. If I update more often, of course, I have a chance of cultivating a thriving comment community.
• There’s no ads on here and it’s going to stay that way unless traffic goes up enough to justify it. Note: I don’t keep track of my traffic. I easily could, but I just don’t bother.
• I delete comments at will. There is no policy about this because it is my blog and the policy is, I delete comments at will. The same policy holds for all site content. Any blog post and any other page on philwelch.net is edited or deleted at will. If for some reason I don’t want to be reminded of you,, the blog will read as if I never knew you. If burned bridges are rebuilt again, I might consider adding you back, unless of course you’re vindictive enough to burn them down again for no apparent reason. If you’re very observant you might know who I’m talking about here. But chances are no one reads my blog that closely.
• I don’t like pants much. Or haircuts.

Seriously though, most of you are okay. So welcome to sheer potentiality.

Comments are back on.

I’ve changed the format of philwelch.net. Hope you like it better.

I also have Google ads, but they’re pretty unobtrusive. I hope.

A bit of explanation of the new title. First off, the previous title was too long, so it’s now the subtitle. Secondly, the previous subtitle, while a clever joke, no one ever got, so I removed it. (For the record it was “straight outta compton union building.”)

So what’s with “sheer potentiality”? Well, St. Thomas Aquinas mostly followed the lead of Aristotle, who wrote quite a bit about potentiality and actuality. Like all medieval Christian philosophers, St. Thomas devoted a lot of work to explaining God. According to Aquinas, since God is perfect, he has no potential—to have potential is to have the capacity to change, and as a perfect being, God does not have the capacity to either become less than perfect, nor to improve. He is thus sheer actuality.

Often I have the feeling that at my stage in life, I have yet to become anything. Nonetheless, I have a large amount of potential. At my time and place in life, who knows what will come of me? Thus—sheer potentiality.

There haven’t been any updates lately because I seem to live a dull and empty life. I’ll post again when I have something to say.

Well, I’m 19 years old as of two days ago. I got a digital camera and the complete third season of The Simpsons. That means—you guessed it—you’ll finally have some idea of what I actually look like now. I’ll post new pics soon. Also, I’ll go over the whole site and do a couple updates.

It looks like my stats package reports the search keyphrases that match philwelch.net when people go Googling for it, so here’s the highlights of July:

do not combine with alcohol

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middle eastern men acting suspiciously

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two-legged-horse

rifle mao tse-tung quotes

dose god hold the world in his hand

integrate blog in dreamweaver

Today, I think, was one of the greatest days in history. I was very happy, as I imagine most of us were, seeing Iraqis cheering in the streets of Baghdad. Whatever you may think of the war, the fact that millions of people who were once suffering under one of the most brutal regimes on earth will soon live free will be welcomed by almost everyone. Everyone, of course, except for Saddam and his family (if they are alive), Ba’ath party loyalists, and the Iraqi information minister. I will miss the Iraqi information minister. Anyone with the ability to insist, with a straight face, that the US military is trapped when they are delivering one of the greatest routs in history, is someone who will be sorely missed. He is like the man who builds a house, carpets the area outside the four walls and keeps the area inside grassy, and declares he has the rest of the world trapped inside his house.

In response to the comments some of you have posted, I like to keep my blog on a two-tiered level. If I start posting comments to comments, people will eventually post comments to comments to comments, and it would be an annoying message board, instead of a blog with comments. So, I’ll respond to your comments here in the main blog.

To unanymous: Okay, you were a bit harsh the first time, but with your second post, I’m starting to see what you were trying to say. I certainly agree people can change. I’ve changed quite a bit. I’m a high school senior right now. If you can’t stand me now, you wouldn’t want to meet the person I was freshman year, or even sophmore year. I wouldn’t want to meet those people either. I’m going to change my life. And you know what? When I go to college next year, I think that will be my best opportunity to do that.

And I totally know what you mean when you say, “The only ones I don’t accept are the ones that resemble whom I once was. I hated myself!”. I’ve been in the same situation, meeting people who resembled who I once was.

I’ve never posted this on here, but I was actually once treated and medicated for depression. I took Zoloft for a number of years. What happened? It destroyed my ability to concentrate. I could block out the entire world for hours and concentrate on one thing once. I can still do it, but it’s a lot harder now. And I was still depressed! Drugs, legal or not, do not help you.

Now I go back and forth between depression and happiness. I think I’m overall more emotional than normal, because I think all my emotions–happiness, anger, depression, even fear–are rather strong. However, oddly enough, I’m also a very logical person, and my emotions don’t cloud my judgment (usually).

And by the way, I love Star Trek too, even though Enterprise is a disaster. Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway all had an air of firm authority about them. Archer? Archer is who we’d end up with if we put a French diplomat as the first starship captain. And I’m not even going into continuity issues. But I still like the rest of Trek. You know you’re a Trekkie when you genuinely enjoy William Shatner’s acting :)

Thanks for the comments. Even if you can’t stand me, it’s good to know that my blog has some regular readers.