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I was thinking of that poem, too, Calderon, when I read the first part of your post--the connection between "generation" and "genre". This idea of yours is really interesting:

"I also believe that we try to create definitions that we think are better than the previous or that we think would be better for out future generations."

There's a parallel between writing a blog and "writing" history as is happens (which is to say, living and making changes in the world). I definitely agree with your idea that we create new definitions for everything as time passes, and the example of slavery and what is a human being is a good one. It gets back to what I was trying to express in my post about Junot Díaz: people can build up systems or structures of meaning that will allow for events to take place within the system that never would take place outside of it. So, in the early 19th century in America, the definition of a human was not what it is in America today, so slavery was allowed to happen. What really supports this idea is the example, in Díaz's book, of a structure of different definitions--a dictatorship--that takes place simultaneous to systems unlike it. In the Trujillo dictatorship, the definition of a human life was different that what it was in, say, Pennsylvania at the same time. The Holocaust happened in Germany in 1940s, but didn't happen here and it couldn't have without a similar building-up of the structures that made it seem good/acceptable to enough people in Nazi Germany.

I think this has a lot to do with your comment that the essence of politics is the attempt to change (because you mention it, that makes a lot of sense in relation to the comparative politics class I took, too). And I like Christina's example of the impossibility of defining the velocity and the speed at the same time (I think that's what it was)--because the definition relies on change.

The word "definition" is a good one for this coversation, since it means to set limits and make something "finite". The limits (of governments, blogs, what is a human, etc) are always shifting and changing, because people change them; the genres never stop emerging.