An introduction of sorts
“If I could do just one near-perfect thing, I’d be happy.”
College students develop a strange sort of predilection towards writing when they leave the country. This desire to document exists independently of whether the student has ever written an un-assigned sentence; something about existing in a foreign country gives previously dull lives a certain unearned significance and worth.
It’s the first time that the students sees their lives as unique enough to warrant travel blogs that are essentially an extended, adult version of that kid on the playground tugging at your shirt and saying, “Look at what I did!” only to hold up a fabulous fistful of dead insects. It’s incredibly important to students who go abroad, experiencing new things, that we share our thoughts with the world back home. So we write up sappy, sanguine blog posts and spread them around like that little kid spreads those bug guts all over your jeans.
The catch comes once the student returns home; inevitably, you realize that your life, with exceptions, just isn’t that interesting. What to write about now? It’s a difficult question for a bright-eyed and timorous undergrad when the primary source material is 40-hour work weeks and the occasional ultimate Frisbee game.
For some, the study abroad blog is inherently ephemeral; it’s enough for these travelers to document the day-to-day, sun-and-rain, routine-and-extraordinary experiences in much the same way one would keep a personal journal. Spent a weekend in City X with Friend Y, Saw An Amazing Attraction, Consumed my first Local Alcohol.
For others, (for me) there exists an ethereal draw to observe and consume and create stuff, a gnawing pull to share our thoughts, however benign and inconsequential they may seem inwardly — ideally with the world, but in all probability with a small circle of friends and family — that becomes harder and harder to satisfy as our lives become more and more mundane.
We want to tell stories.
So here I am, struggling to curate a head full of ideas gathered in the last few months at home into a project that’s topical and poignant and semi-intelligent sounding. There’s a vague notion in my head about something editorial in nature — part ethnography, informed op-ed, and narrative journalism — that still remains outside the realm of polemics.
My insecurities batter me incessantly. Chief among them: how can I — a young person from a small town, relatively disconnected from the changing media landscape and with a dearth of knowledge in subjects that everyone else seems to be privy to — create anything worth reading? A subconscious side-goal of this project is to not produce anything that could be used as fodder for an Awl piece.
After a month-long musing, I’ve arrived at a formula for this project. By combining a willingness to learn and my newly found obsession with the nature of our opinions with my general stance as an only-moderately informed person, (read as, someone who will nod in acknowledgement in response to an idea whilst subtly Googling the basics under the table) I hope to wind up with an exploratory, explanatory, fly-on-the-wall-but-sometimes-in-your-ear sort of thing.
The ideal characterization would be that of a ferryman, shuttling passengers from one side of a body of water to the other — except in this case, the passengers are the complex events and ideas that make up the changing media landscape, and the body of water is the expanse of knowledge separating those ideas from their intended destination: the consumers on the other side.
So I shall attempt to fill the role of Charon, but not unselfishly. Diving into the realm of opinions, one must himself be armed, and as of now all I am wielding is a piece of question-mark-adorned cardboard. My goal of this is to explore how people, and myself, make the decisions we make and come to the conclusions we come to amid the swirl of events, trials, scandals, scares, tragedies, campaigns, tests, stumbles, lists, feeds, promises and rhetoric that make up our experience of the world in the 21st century.
I’m not trying to ‘fill a hole’ in the blogosphere. I just want to try my hand at writing on topical issues, answering questions, and exploring different realms of thought. I want to learn with you.
I can’t promise that my posts will be any more engaging than a handful of squished caterpillars, but I hope at the very least to get to know better the playground.
