My office

Here is a little video I shot of my office sometime in the last few days. It's where the magic happens.

It's been a while

So, I've been not blogging for a while, and I am frankly interested in maintaining a regular practice. Well, that's a part of what motivates me here. The other part is that I realize I am enjoying my blog at the expense of facebook. As anyone who knows me will attest to, I can be a very, very, very, very long-winded person--and being from slow-talking Iowa doesn't help. I have tried to edit the inessentials out with time, with some success, but you know, my desire to preserve meaning is stronger than my urge to foreground what is most essential. I'm a record-keeper, a hoarder, a person who grabs and pockets something before he thinks about how he might use it. I assume I will not immediately grasp the value of something, that it will surprise me and that--a few seconds, minutes, weeks, or years later--I will finally get it. And at that moment, I will reach into my pocket or file cabinet and try to find it. And I will try hard. That is what I can promise. I will try hard. I won't promise anything else.

So, being a meaning-preserver leads me to uncritically collect--and I think that blogging gives me the affordances of time and space in which to uncritically collect. And I like that. With facebook, I don't get this opportunity. I have to be quick; I think about what sentence or two another person could read. It's all very much a drive-by sort of thing.

With my blog, it is different. At this point, I am pretty damn sure that no one cares what I am writing here. I am kind of glad I left this baby silent for a long time because now I can speak and write and post images and videos and not think too much about what an audience might think--because I realize that if I ever had an audience, I must have lost the interest of that audience maybe two years ago.

Maybe the blog, however, is just different because I get to go on and on and on and can do so multimodally.

I can't quite describe it, but I can say that blogs have more affordances than facebook. At least I think they do. And I love that.

I am writing about what interests me, and everyone else can, too.