Mexico Medical Student |

I primarily use ecto on my Mac(s) to compose blog entries. I’m not writing about the program (though it’s best strength IMO is its customizability when you want to get under-the-hood of the markup code) per se, but one thing that always surprises me when I fire it up, thinking of a new topic to post about, is the sheer amount of drafts waiting to be completed. There is an unmistakable, lopsided ratio of drafts:posts.

Part of the problem is that I get interrupted. A lot. With a 10-month-old, this should come as no surprise. Another problem, and perhaps more relevant, is that I’ll get all fired up about something, scribble down a good bit, but know it’s not polished for public posting. It’s definitely comprehensible, not just stream-of-consciousness babble, but my standards for publishing are high (even annoying myself), so I put it aside and look forward to returning with fresh eyes. That might be as much as a few days later; meanwhile, the interest in the topic has waned, I’m now thinking on other things (perhaps opening new drafts!) and a thin film of dust–barely perceptible but unmistakably there–begins to accumulate on the website. I don’t read other sites with hardly a critical eye at all, and I certainly don’t think that others come here with a “BlanketyBlank Manual of Style,” complain that I use parentheses too much (I do!), and leave in a huff. So what gives?

As I’m reviewing microbiology in general, and specifically immunology since I have a love/hate relationship with this topic (so much so, I volunteered to do the painful task of coming up with clinical vignette questions on this dense topic for a study group), I have come to the realization my blog drafts are like immature T cells coming to me, Thymus Rex, to mature, grow, and develop. I nurture them, hoping to one day post them to the world, each one a unique combination of words with its own meaning and potential. If at any point, however, I see something I don’t like or know that there is no way that a given post will ever make it out there on its own, I just flag it for deletion (apoptosis). There is a code, a standard. Sometime that standard is too high, and the blog-rot that ensues is visible to all. At least I’m not as bad as a real thymus: less than 5% of the original pre-T cells in real life make it out as mature, functional T lymphocytes. Talk about a blogging complex if that were true!

I was writing to a surgeon blogger friend about this the other day when this idea first struck me (I won’t mention names, but his initials are Sid Schwab), and he replied in not so many words, “Thank God I don’t have to worry about the specifics of T-cells anymore.” For now though, I still have to, and since I’m pretty much always thinking about some aspect of medicine, science, computing or music, weird combinations like blogging and T-cell maturation make these inexplicable connections. It took 10x as long to write down than it did to think about, but I hope this entertains somebody out there.

Perhaps this draft should have been nixed. Uh oh, now my blog is going to get some autoimmune disease…dammit!