The weekly reading for week 3, The Age of the Essay by Paul Graham, ends on an irresistible note on ‘Disobedience’

He urges to go with your gut, to follow the threads that attract your attention, even if they are ‘irrelevant’, he in fact says that if limited to offering a single piece of advice about writing an essays it would be this note on disobedience. Summarised as: Don’t do what you’re told… don’t write the essay readers expect.

So in an experiment in disobedience, I am throwing out my checklist of ‘must haves’ for this blog entry to see where my attention is drawn. Grahram tries this with a simple starting point of a curious personal intrigue with comb overs and abstracts an essence from this seemingly trivial point of interest that relates seamlessly back to his discussion of essay writing, so I stare blankly at the screen wondering where do I start, can I write so succinctly as to expore my own personal trivial thought and extrapolate something more profound about this practice of blogging or writing essays from it?

After many watching the minute hand past the 12,  then the 6, then the 12 again, surely the answer for now is only, maybe. I will have to leave this exercise feeling defeated and return to tackle it another day.