Beginning

Let's start things off on the right foot. With honor. With candor. With honesty. Like we used to: as a family.

I really didn't like blogs when they first appeared. I disliked their cutesy-hip contraction of a name. I disliked the thought that we needed a new name for online journals, which of course had already been in existence since the dawn of the Web, in one form or another. I especially disliked their trendiness, their nature as a fad.

People would often say to me, "Joel, you should get a blog! I'd love to read it. I'm sure yours would be really cool!" I would smile and nod, say maybe someday (or something like that), and think, just wait until the fad passes; then they'll stop bugging you. You see, I have been writing and emailing chronicles of my life since I entered college, mainly as a way to keep in touch with friends, although I also enjoyed the chance to moonlight as a wordsmith. Majoring in chemical engineering doesn't allow much opportunity for stoking the fires of the furnace of language, pumping the bellows of syntax, or otherwise creating exaggerated, overly fanciful metaphors. (It also doesn't allow much opportunity for self-referential jokes.)

Then, time passed on our planet. Since I was not off traveling at the speed of light relative to you, an observer, I aged. I changed. No, I did not grow more conservative in my voting tendencies or begin playing shuffleboard. Instead, I noticed that the blog fad had not passed; no, it had only grown. Blogs were now more common, and the Spirit of Fad had moved on to things like podcasting or Thefacebook. So when the summer months rolled around and the ever-present monsoon that was homework last semester finally passed, I decided to take the plunge and see what new things I could forge with this new medium.

Thus, the tale of a curmudgeon, mellowed and reformed.