Birth of the Blog

Posted on April 6th, 2003 — Filed under Personal

So I’d been promising myself that I would do it for some time now. I’ve been fascinated by journals and diaries and the like since I started keeping one just after high school. Really, I think it was going back and reading my own journals that made the difference. When you reach back into a journaled past, a flood of memory and experience comes rushing in and suddenly you’re there again, experiencing those things, feeling those things, vividly surrounded by the experiences that made you the person you are today. And of course when I say “you,” I mean “me.”

This blog is not intended to be my “real” journal that I write in only when feeling profound and deeply sophisticated. Yes, I keep another journal, which is actually a set of leather-bound volumes filled with memorable wisdom and earth-shattering realizations that I’ll one day pass onto my children, or will perhaps use as fuel in a bad snowstorm. The problem with them is that they’re so beautiful and serious looking that I don’t use them casually. Like I alluded to before, I want them to be a deeper exposure of my soul than the surface “this is what I did today” kind of stuff.

So that brings us here. This blog is going to be my day-to-day journal of exciting adventures and humdrum Wednesdays. Not a chance that I’ll actually update it daily though. Monthly is more likely.

So let us begin.

I’m in the tiny hamlet of Shaumburg, Illinois, which I believe is a suburb of Chicago, but everyone else thinks I’m crazy because Chicago is 30 miles away. Whatever. I’m in the last week of a long but lucrative contract for installing computer systems in grocery stores. What a chore the past two months have been. I’ve been to Philadelphia, Newark, Annapolis, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, blah blah blah doing the graveyard shift. You’d think that installing computer systems was a nice white collar job. Nope. All the old computers I remove and the new ones I install are HEAVY. And every place I put them in is usually gilded with pointy metal. So sweat and blood is the typical evening wear.

I’m not saying that it’s a total drag. For the problems I’ve had travelling (28 hour, 5 airplane flight from Maryland to Ohio, for example), I really do enjoying getting on airplanes and meeting new people and going to new places. Wanderlust still rules my heart and probably will until the distant day has come.

I’ve met some interesting people, some interested people and some genuine idiots and jackasses. For instance, the Bengali woman on a flight from Baltimore to O’Hare who played hell with the stereotypes I have of people from the Indian subcontinent, or the guy from Baltimore who taught me a new meaning for “kill yourself before this guy has a chance to say another word.”

As far as the ultimate purpose of this journal, i.e., the evolution of a person starting from scratch, you’ll have wait for that kind of stuff in upcoming episodes.

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