Unlike the other two editors of this magazine, I do not have a bi-national heritage, unless a person can count Alabama and Florida as two separate countries, which might not be unjustifiable.  I am 100% American, or so I say, because honestly I have no idea where my family originally comes from, and any attempts I make to trace back my family tree become unbelievably convoluted thanks to some tried-and-true Alabama-style intermarriage.  

That said, I consider myself a Floridian.  I was born and raised in Florida, and although my father is from Alabama, and the majority of my family lives in Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia, I do not consider myself a Southerner.  Florida is more of a southernly appendage than an actual part of the South, and has its own unique culture (for more about my views on Florida, check out my bio).

In any case, I have decided to leave the political discussions and historical musings to the other two editors, because they are very good at those sorts of things, and frankly I’m…well… not.  So instead, I am focusing this column on what I actually do know something about:  lots of random junk.

If you’re wondering how random junk qualifies as a focus, let me just say this:  I switched my major in college more times than any one person should be allowed to, and as a result, I have a surface-level knowledge of a very diverse group of subjects, including medicine, biology, zoology, mathematics, art, music, psychology, and of course, literature and writing.  In fact, I’d probably do rather well on Jeopardy -- that is, if so many of their categories weren’t politics and history-related.

This column will feature a new topic each week; sometimes the topics may be related from one week to the next, sometimes not.  Sometimes the column will contain poetry or fiction, sometimes not.  In other words, I will write about whatever I feel like writing about, and then attempt to make it look like this column actually has some sort of focus. 

Who knows… maybe my random thoughts really do have some underlying, unifying connection.

Then again, maybe they don’t.

Oh, one last thing -- in a shocking display of organization and planning-ahead (amongst all the randomness), I have already chosen the topic for next week: “Get Your Twitter Out of My Face,” a discussion of the trend in online status updates on sites like Twitter and Facebook (Thanks to Quentin Vieregge for the title!).

Random Statement of the Week:  It’s like a wookie on a sensible librarian.

(Note: above random statement was inspired by one of this month’s stories, and is intended to be used as a simile whenever the opportunity arises.  Try it out sometime!)