Blog Manifesto + Free Hugs + Road Trip 2011

This is my 500th post.  I estimate that I’ve written about 300,000, words here, possibly a lot more.  That’s three novels.  And most of it is a mystery to me.   I guess that’s what makes blogs different from novels.  They’re serial.  I can say something one day and say the opposite the next.  It doesn’t have to be systematic.  If it’s honest, then it probably won’t be.

A lot of the words here are a mystery to me, because I don’t remember writing them.    I have an idea, a feeling, I write it, post it, read responses to it, and move onto the next.  In blogging more than anything else, I avoid brain crack.  I don’t sit on ideas and think about how amazing they will be; I put them down in words, throw them out into the world, and as a result, new ideas find me.  The more I blog, the more I have to blog about; the less I blog, the less I have to blog about.

Academic writing rarely gets read, journals aren’t meant to be read, novels take years to craft, and so blogging is this unique medium that catalogs my passing thoughts and connects me to other people.  When I think about the kind of blogger I want to be, sometimes I think I’d like this place to be more sophisticated, my words better crafted, fewer typos, less frequent but more insightful posts.  I hear people say that they don’t blog unless they have something to say, and it sounds good, but I always have something to say, and even if it’s of little consequence, it matters to me.

In defining whatever it is I do here, I’ve sometimes desired to be like other bloggers, but the minute I try, whatever it is that’s motivated me to write so many words starts evaporating.  I like to write a lot, I don’t like to edit much, I like to write as myself, I don’t like to write about things I don’t have strong feelings about, I don’t tell stories well,  I like to use words more than pictures, I don’t talk much about the day-to-day, I feel too limited by regular features, and I will always get distracted by other options before I remember these things about myself.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a blog manifesto.  It’s just that I didn’t figure these things out for myself until I wrote them.  I declare here and now that I will continue to publish hastily written posts on all the common and strange things that interest me.  They will more than likely be serious and I will mean most every word.

500 is a milestone I insist on celebrating because it took me so long to get here and it’s going to take me a really long time to reach another one worth celebrating.  On this special occasion, I’m giving away free hugs.  Except, fair warning, I’m a bad hugger.  In the first place, I’m just not the hugging type.  Not that I have anything against them, but it’s not a natural thing for me.  On top of which, my brother and sister and I all picked up this weird habit from our Dad where we pat people on the back when we’re hugging them.  It sounds nice, but it comes off a little bit more like, “please let go of me now.”   I never noticed I was doing it until my step-dad pointed it out.  He calls it the patented [LastName] Hug.  So, yeah, line up for your free one of those.

You can come to California and collect your hug anytime or you can wait a year for me to come to you.  I am really quite serious about Road Trip 2011, scheduled to take place next Summer, where I travel around the country visiting bloggers.  It’s one of the things I’ll be saving for once I’m out of debt.  I don’t know how it will work, but I think it could be amazing.  Maybe some of you will even do some of the traveling with me.  Who knows. But, I’ll just put the hard work of planning off until later when I have even less time than I do now, and concentrate on the awesome for now.

Here’s to 500 more!