Five Years

Today five years ago I started blogging. Since May 26, 2004 I've written 1,287 posts (including this one). I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. When I started I had daydreams of becoming one of the big-time political bloggers, but I never had the discipline (or time, or luck) to do the things one needs to do in order to do so. I'm a lurker rather than a commenter, and I have despite several half-hearted attempts failed to find a particular niche. I'd love to be able to write about the things I see in local politics, but unlike New York, the place I live is just too small to preserve my anonymity.

So in a limited sense I can say the blog has been a disappointment, but only in that one very specific way. I think I can say with honesty that I was never really obsessed with the art of blogging per se. The principal reason I wrote is because I was outraged by so much of what I saw in the world and needed some venue to express it. Expressing it at home was driving Brazen Hussy a little crazy, so the blog was a good alternative to her murdering me in my bed.

I also started blogging because I missed writing. Writing has always been one of the ways I work out my thoughts, and if you go back and look at the older archives, you can see a lot of pretty abstract analysis of American politics. Now I've returned to academic research (both theoretical and empirical) and am working on a novel, so there isn't quite the itch to write every day that there used to be. The first year or so I wrote every single day, with few exceptions. Now it's down to a few times a week.

I never expected to make friends blogging, yet I have. Most of my readers started out on Brazen Hussy's blog, so I suppose that they're friends by the transitive principle, but that's okay. I've met some very nice people I never would have otherwise, a fact that alone makes this blog worth it.

I'm not entirely sure any longer what this blog is for, but I'm going to keep at it and see what happens. This blog was incredibly important for me when I lived in New York because of the sort of life I was living then. And there was the need to yell about George Bush, who is now gone. Obama annoys me but I don't rage at him that way I did at his predecessor. Where I am now, blogging is a lot more peripheral, but I won't be here forever (at least I don't think so) and the blog might be more important later.

I suppose what I'm attempting to express is these ramblings is that I thank you for reading whatever nonsense has been popping into my head over these last 5 years. And given my inability to ever let anything go, don't be surprised if I'm still here in another five.