Passions, Obvious and Secret

I'm not a huge follower of The Huffington Post, but it's definitely a popular enough site that blogging tips from its founder, Ariana Huffington, are tough to ignore. According to her, anybody unemployed should have plenty of time to blog, so I'm two thirds of the way there already, I guess. She also gave two more specific tips recently on the Daily Show:

"The first trick, the most important, is to write about your passions. Blog your passions. Blog your obvious passions. Blog your secret passions…" The second tip is to not overthink things.

So, my obvious passions. The top ten that come to mind quickly, in no particular order, are:

my family
the arts
lefty politics (environmentalism, feminism, anti-racism, GLBT issues, peace and justice, etc.)
freelance writing and other interesting work opportunities
healthy living stuff like whole food cooking and yoga
nature
world travel
amazing spectacles, like burning man or anything that explodes
goofy fun stuff like hula hooping
crafts and other DIY projects

That's a pretty good list, I think. If I could even blog consistently about those things, I'd have an interesting blog, and also one that would be fairly inoffensive to at least half the people on the internet.

Then there are my "secret" passions. These aren't really secrets that no one knows about, by a long stretch. But they are things that, for one reason or another, I tend to reserve in real life for conversations with people with similar interests. The top ten in this category would probably include:

really horrible junk food like pop tarts
wonky new-age spirituality, comparative religion and occult stuff
anarcha-feminist hellraising
sexuality
radical DIY and alternative health care
radical (unconditional or consensual) parenting and unschooling
altered states of consciousness, trance, and so on
fashion, the odder the better
survivalism, primitivism, and apocalyptic speculation
obsessive, martha-stewart style domesticity (hey, I didn't say I actually do these things!)

I would say that makes for a more interesting list, especially if you use the two together. It's also a list that leads to speculation about whether anyone else in the world is interested in even half these things (with the likely exception of my wonderful mate), and concerns about alienating the few readers I seem to have.

But I've thought and blogged these issues to death, and that brings us back to Ariana's second suggestion. She's famous, so she must know what she's talking about. Perhaps for a while I'll try to stop overthinking things, and make at least one post related to my "secret" passions for every obvious passion post. Or something like that.