Citizen On Mars Blog Review

Renan is renan. If you visit his blog “Random Musings Of A Disorganized Mind”, you will find not much information about the man behind the name, not even in the profile section. So who is really renan and what’s is he fuzzing about? I scoured through half-a-year’s worth of writing in order to unravel this mystery and at one point there, I started to realize that the seeming ambiguity behind the name was somewhat intentional for simply said, this blogsite is more of substance than personality (or style for that matter). What I mean is that the contents of “Random Musings Of A Disorganized Mind” speaks thunderously for itself with its highly-informative postings like “Writing your dissertation with LaTeX” (Saturday, September 25, 2004) and “Are you QWERTY or Dvorak?” (Monday, October 18, 2004) and propound philosophy in entries like “The Burden of Teachers” (Wednesday, September 29, 2004). In one segment of this blog, renan even painstakingly narrated point by point how to install Linux and Windows XP as partitions in one hard disk space, designed to be in a dual boot system and his explanation was crystalline enough that I almost believed that given an hour or two, I may be able to perfect this trick that only computer geeks seem to have a clue about.

Traipsing further into this “disorganized mind”, you’d be surprised how “organized” is the author’s insight on varied subjects that tackles so many facets of life from Philippine laws to movies and even cartoon shows on television. Renan is a chemist and with that scientific background, the reader will have not have much choice but to admire the clarity of each presentation and the conciseness of each idea proffered. This blog is a little subliminal in a sense that it takes hold of you the moment you read through it and try to influence your views of the world with frequent referrals to great icons of the times such as Shakespeare, Ray Charles, Rudyard Kipling, Feodor Dostoyevsky, and Hayao Mizayaki. Simply put, “Random Musings Of A Disorganized Mind” gives us a rare glimpse of the mind of a true-blue intellectual and see for ourselves if we can also someday be called “an intellectual”---which of course is a good thing.

All is not about “intellect” or “thought” in this blog as once in a while, renan speaks in a melancholic way and tells us how he longed for the home country after being away for more than five years and the many native foods that had defined his younger days back in U.P. Los Baños when he was still then a youthful student. He allows us at times to peep into his family life---with S. and a daughter---and how they spend wonderful moments together; mostly by going to the movies; typical of how Filipino families seek simple but joyful pleasures. Even in America, we retained our uplifting simplicity.

In one simple talk, he had tried to picture himself as a cook and maybe be called “a chemist who cook” someday. This earned some sly smile from me, for I have imagined grimly how a chemist like him might turned a kitchen into a place full of smoking and bubbling ingredients contained in pink flasks and long measured tubes, just like every cartoon scene of a mad scientist’s whizzing laboratory. We might not want to eat our food that way. Just kidding here.

There is one hitch to this site though and that is the infrequency of postings where each entry is at times too far apart. This maybe mainly because renan is such a busy soul (he is a chemist) and it is just but expected of a Filipino scientist living in America. But despite of this, the reader shouldn’t mind waiting for each upcoming entry for certainly, each one would be as informative, insightful, and subliminal as the ones we have already read.

Design is just fittingly appropriate for a blog that is more of substance than style.

All in all, “Random Musings Of A Disorganized Mind” is a good thing that should not go away and stay for good as a reading habit.

GO TO : Random Musings Of A Disorganized Mind.