Here we are now / Entertain us / Read my damned blog

"I've made a decision about your life," remarked my girlfriend to me today as we watched a 590 pound pumpkin crush a van, "you're going to blog again."

It's not a bad decision for a number of reasons. For one thing, I'm not writing as much as I should be. I like writing. When I'm on my game, I think I'm quite good at it (although this certainly doesn't preclude my churning out thousands of words of hackneyed drivel the rest of the time - welcome to my blog!). I have some ambition to eventually get myself published in some meaningful form (no disrespect intended to the St. Albert Gazette, the Alberta Teachers' Association News, or the Gateway). To attain this ambition I'm going to have to write, and I'm not doing nearly enough of it.

Besides that, I'm experiencing a very mild third-of-life crisis. It's mostly the standard stuff: what am I doing with my life, can I ever give myself the self-discipline to match my ambitions and abilities, at what age will I be able to grow facial hair of the sort possessed by actual adult males, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc., etc. But it's exacerbated by the accomplishments I see by my peers. My predecessor as Business Manager of the Gateway Student Journalism Society, Don Iveson, recently became the first candidate in twelve years to knock off a sitting Edmonton city councillor. I'm thrilled; I volunteered for his campaign, and I think he's going to be an exceptional councillor. That he turfed Mike Nickel is just gravy. But I look at Don, and I can't help but to notice that I'm lazier, less articulate, and shorter (I'm also a worse business manager, but this is praise by faint damnation - I can't take any more offense to this than could Jimmy Carter when his mother ranked him as the sixth best President in American history). Don's three years older than me; will I have done anything comparable to what he's done three years hence? Of course, the accomplishment wasn't all Don's. The media has taken great care, when talking about his victory, to highlight his near-flawless campaign. It was run by my roommate.

There's some nostalgia in this decision, too: once upon a time I had a blog. It got pretty respectable readership. Sometimes it got me mentioned by semi-prominent people, like Toronto Star columnists and anonymous bloggers. Combined with my time in student politics, it provided me with a certain level of glory that's been missing lately. here's an example of what I mean. Life's good, but I have an ego to satiate, and my current activities aren't doing the trick; worship me, readers.

That left the question of where to blog. My old blog was the most obvious option, but since I abandoned it for the first time I've made plenty of attempts to come back to it; rarely did these attempts last longer than a few posts. I now realize that that blog and I had good times, but it's time to move on. I hope we can still be friends.

Then there's Points of Information, to which I used to be a sometime contributor, before it fell on hard times. There are plenty of reasons that I might have considered using it as my venue: in its day, it had a good reputation. It's well-designed, something that no blog to which I'm the sole contributor will ever be. It allowed for some interplay between me and some very intelligent co-contributors. But I think I need to go it alone, for now. Besides that, it doesn't allow commenting, and it's hard to receive sufficient adulation through trackback.

Here we are, then, at my new blog. I've been pretty stagnant lately: this is my notice that I'm about to get back in motion.