About This Blog

(This page is based on my first blog entry)

Due to popular demand (OK, one person’s suggestion), I started this blog in October 2008.

It’s funny I started an official blog only then. For years, I’d been publishing my irrelevant thoughts in one form or another. More recently it was in the Notes on Thefacebook or a Japanese diary on Mixi. In college, it was a business column titled Strictly Business in The Heights, Boston College’s newspaper. In high school, I wrote a personal column in the school’s paper and briefly ran a website with lots of words but very few pictures. Although writing was hardly ever my forté, the constant desire to publish suggests either I like to write or I’m so narcisstic I can only take comfort if I feel like people care what I have to say, even if they don’t.

I haven’t changed much since high school, which is to say the topics I care enough to write about are essentially what my website was about when I was 18. I still like the Patriots and the Yankees, although more the former because I like football over baseball. I still like to talk business, although now I have to put my money where my mouth is because I have enough money to invest. I still like Macs, although it’s no longer cool or uncool (depending on your perspective) to have a Mac. And I love talking politics, although I am having less patience for dissent ever since college.

I may not have grown wiser as I’ve aged, but my interests have grown somewhat more diverse. Attending Boston College for six years has made me an unabashed fan of the school, its athletics, its philosophy and its education. I’ve recently rediscovered my passion for writing fiction, something I used to enjoy when I was in middle school. I also seem to talk more about personal things like my family and my career; hopefully people don’t take it as whining.

But I continue to detest art, love James Bond, enjoy math, and be tall. I am, undoubtedly, the same Joe Michael Sasanuma people saw in one way or another in 1995, 1998, 2000, 2004, and 2007. Through this blog, friends old and new, people familiar and not, colleagues of the past or present can learn, rediscover, or confirm what I’m all about, which isn’t much. My co-workers at my prior employment found out all about me in about a month.

Still, this exercise is going to be a lot of fun. It gives me a more official publication to post my thoughts and hopefully increase my readership to those who may not be my acquaintance. As Toby Keith may sing, I intend to talk about “my me my, what I think, what I like, what I know, what I want, what I see.”* With one exception. I’ll limit myself to talking about politics except on few, rare occasions. I have another project, titled Letters to a Congressman, where I express my political thoughts in a letter to my Congressman and post it online. Although the letters have been few and far in between, I find this process to provide a more objective, thoughtful and methodical analysis than in a blog, thereby subjecting myself to less embarassment. Having found the art of avoiding politics when I wrote in college, I’m fairly confident I can do so here.

Although not all entries are likely to perfectly fit the mold, I’d like to categorize my entries in the following categories:

• Sports
• Boston College
• Business
• Politics
• Personal stories
• Fiction

I hope to make the fiction section the most enduring. Creative writing requires not only commitment and perseverance, which are difficult enough, but also, as the name suggests, creativity, something I severely lack. I have ideas floating in my mind. Maybe if I put it down, it’ll turn into something good.

The blog is called “The World According to Joe.” It’s what I named my column in high school. It perfectly describes what this blog is about, to say nothing of what it says about the ego of the author.

• Toby Keith, “I Wanna Talk About Me” from “Pull My Chain” (2001).