The topic du jour in blogaria...and in my house, it seems...is outlines.
Doc says all blogs are outlines. The Supernova bloggers all seemed to report some version of Dave Winer saying that "everything is an outline."
So this morning, I decided to try the OmniOutliner tool that I read about on Joi's blog.
Here's the scary part. As I was reading through the docs, and trying to puzzle out the tool, my six-year-old son Alex was lying on the prayer rug in our living room, tracing the designs with his finger. And he suddenly said "Mom, why does everything have to have an outline?"
Huh? He couldn't see my screen from where he's sitting. I was temporarily speechless, since he seemed to have given voice to my thoughts, and I couldn't fathom how that had happened.
Then I realized that he was talking about the outlines of the images on the rug.
So here's the dialog that followed...
Me: They don't.
Alex: Name one thing that doesn't.
Me: Air.
Alex: [frustrated sigh] I mean things you can see.
Me: Well, what do you mean by "an outline"?
Alex: [in voice reserved for talking with very stupid adults] An *outline*, mom. You *know* what I mean.
Me: Well, if you mean an edge, or a boundary, you may be right. If you mean a line around the outside, lots of things don't have an outline...like the chair you're next to.
Alex: That's *not* what I mean. You just don't get it.
[Which, alas, seems to be true more and more often as they get older.]
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