Intro

Oh, hello there, I didn't see you come in. Well, greetings. My name is John M. Tryneski. Although, I guess the odds are that, at this point, if you're reading this, you probably already knew that. I'm a 26 year old guy doing what seemingly every liberal arts school humanities major is doing, living on the periphery of a hipster enclave in a major American city, not working in a chosen career, trying to figure out how to turn my skills and passions into a life and career that won't look too bad on the ol' death bed.

Since I've been at this a while, this isn't my first blog. Since July 2011 I've written a blog called On Warmer Music. It started as a forum for all my musical rantings and ravings that I couldn't find an audience for at the bar and since lead to the opportunity for me to write about music, books and other things for the websites PopMatters and Spectrum Culture. I guess a little exposure is a dangerous thing because the more I've written about music and other aspects of pop culture, the more eager I am to write about broader ideas. So rather than keep shoehorning my own musings on life, the universe and everything into pieces supposedly about pop music, I decided to give them another home and thus was this blog born.

My goals for Learning To Think are modest. I present it simply as a space for my thoughts on anything that strikes my fancy that doesn't fit into pop culture criticism. The title is taken from a David Foster Wallace quote (yeah go ahead and check off another box on your Stuff White People Like at-home bingo card) where he talks about the idea that because each person's perception of reality must go through the filter of their mind, we as individuals have get to determine what has meaning in our lives. It's a simple but heady concept that I'm not doing justice but I attempt to elucidate slightly here.

Regardless, I make no claim as to the worthiness of my ideas, any insight they might hold or even their interest to you, as a reader. The older I get the more I realize how truly unspecial my talents or ideas are both in the "there are a lot more people who are a lot smarter than me than I realized"-sense as well as in a "the convergence of total data and a consumer culture on steroids means that no matter how cool you think you are there are thousands of people with eerily similar taste to you just a click away"-sense. But if that's the world I'm handed, can I do but gird my loins and try and make some fucking sense of it? Having been given a suitable temperament and platform for the job, this blog is an attempt to do just that.