Sanity Hearing

Blogaversary

I realize that I have not posted in an inexcusably long period of time.  I've had several ideas for ground breaking posts that were supposed to make up for the fact that I have slacked off for a month or so, but as most positive and creative things come in my life-- that is not the case.  This post comes as I sit at 12:36 in the morning, unable to sleep, listening to Keane and eating humus, my mind flooded with a million thoughts.

The listening to Keane is no coincidence actually, I started listening to the CD on an almost exclusive repeat in my car about a year ago-- about the time that I started this blog.  Last Thursday I found myself sitting next to Matt at the bar, both of us starring forward and pensively sipping our drinks, more being thought than being said, Matt remarked, "A lot has changed in a year.  Hasn't it?"

Indeed.  A lot has changed. Since I won't describe everything in my life that's changed-- I'll confine it to this page.   This page has served many purposes over that time.  Confessional, manifesto, stage, comedy routine, drafting board.  It's been a subject of conversation, it's caused contraversy, been the source of anxiety, and according to Wendy was a contributing source of interest in me at least in terms of getting her on the telephone.  I've done book reviews, I've done comedy, I've written my most private frustrations that led to my Mom sending me concerned emails the next morning and good friends telling me why I was wrong about my vexations.  What I have recycled from this page led to my publication in the law school newspaper The Docket and led to the fact that I now find myself as editor-in-chief of that same publication.

Forthcoming will be a post about law school.  Something for general consumption that I plan to use in the opening issue of the Docket.  First though, I thought I'd say here-- as third year begins, I realize how much changes each year.  Old friends I see less of, goals realized and abandoned, old love forgotten and new love clutched onto tightly.  The same friends I once sat drinking hurricanes with all sunday afternoon and watching football, going to brothers meetings and making fun of guys we knew were jerks, I now call and talk about careers and the meaning of work and life.  I suppose it's really not that different in some respects-- we just are busier.

I find many memories of college and high school rushing through my brain more than ever before.  Hurts and unpleasant...tough times, things I tried to bury at one time I now let wash over me remembering sharp pains and disappointments, for reasons I couldn't honestly tell you.   Memories of people lost fade a little more every year.  Stories are all I have of the good times at this point, although unfortunately the pain of the bad times and the  losing times are as sharp as a shard of broken glass puncturing the soft part of my foot.

A lot can change in a year.  As I look forward, I know there are those I will lose as I lost before.  Friends whose relationship though strong, was contingent upon a time and place.  I anticipate the challenges ahead of me.  Part of me wished they weren't there, but I know I chose this path and now I have to face them.  Some of them of them are academic, some of them are not.  Will I be able to maintain the relationships that are most important to me?  Family, love, friends?  Time can only tell and I can only give the best I have give.

A lot can change in a year.

What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries?   Mere killing would be too light. Anniversaries are very well up to a certain   point, while one's babies are in the process of growing up: they are joy-flags   that make gay the road and prove progress; and one looks down the fluttering   rank with pride. Then presently one notices that the flagstaffs are in process   of a mysterious change of some sort--change of shape. Yes, they are turning   into milestones. They are marking something lost now, not gained. From that   time on it were best to suppress taking notice of anniversaries.
  - Mark Twain Notebook, 1896

Input Please

I read Hugh MacLeod's Gaping Void nearly every day.  It's a great site even though the general purpose is Hugh's self promotion as an Ad guy.  In combination with my post from yesterday and my subsequent response to Matt's comments make I'm considering taking up a suggestion that Hugh has made several times: blogging my way to a job.  The next year or so I will be looking for a job for after I graduate.  I'm already thinking about what I'd like to do and where I'd like to be.  As Hugh points out frequently a blog allows you to share your insights with anyone who is interested on a daily basis and I see it as a sort of an ongoing job interview to any employer willing to read this thing.

I have a couple reservations though.  For one thing I considered starting a new and seperate blog just to avoid these reservations.  I've hidden one or two of those old posts I felt were to personal or tried to be funny but instead seemed cruel in retrospect.  The other thing that holds me back is that this page has been to a certain extent about my writing-- at least I thought it was, so it seems sort of wrong to convert it into a job search mechanism somehow. 

On the other hand-- there are a lot of advantages assuming some employer actually looked at it.  This page has in many ways been a record of my life as a law student and a lot of times it reflects what I thought or felt about school.

I am curious what people think.

Anonymity

Yesterday someone made a comment on my post about "Marcy".  The commenter made some good observations and criticism-- for the most part pointing out that my post was likely a bit too critical.  My only defense is that this webpage is something I do for fun, a chance to practice writing and hopefully be funny or inciteful once and a while. 

What irks me is that the commenter chose to remain anonymous.  Frankly I am not going to bother changing the whole commenting settings, because people will just make up fake email addresses or something to that effect.  As I mentioned in my reply, most people who read this page are either readers of other blogs, online forums, friends of mine, or people who have found the page through my email signature or some other random venue.  Of those three groups I have a very hard time understanding a reluctance to identify authorship.  While you may feel remaining anonymous is somehow important, it takes away from the credibility of your comments and it causes me to question what motivates your making them.

Blogging Life

Although this webpage is still a few months shy of a one year anniversary, I've been a very loyal reader of various blogs for several years...long enough ago that I was reading blogs when "blog" was not a word that I was aware of, nor was it a word most people would have recognized had I used it in conversation to describe the websites I was reading. 

It seems that everyone seems to have a blog these days, which part of me thinks is pretty cool- after all I suppose I am part of the trend.  What is interesting though is to see what has happened to some of my long time reads- pages I've read since I graduated from college and first found various websites while slacking off on company time at G.E.  At least one of my all time favorites was Mixtape Marathon.  A page written by a girl named Bekah who was a law student at a law school in New Orleans.  I started reading Mixtape right before I went to law school and there was something not just about what Bekah was writing about, but the way she wrote it- it was funny, but not contrived, well written, but not pretentious, that made me love her page and also feel a friendly voice that made first year law school anxiety a little more bearable.  Bekah wrote about all the experiences of law school life- the high school like gossip, being on law review, being in the library on saturdays, being single, and eventually meeting her boyfriend (I believe he led to the demise of the webpage as her neurotic musings seemed to taper off after their relationship began).  Bekah's page was one I recommeded to every law student I knew and even read aloud to my mom on a couple occassions- it is also largely the inspiration for this webpage, if nothing else in the sense that aspire to describe my law school experiences as well as she did.  Sadly, Bekah stopped writing, but her page is still up I urge people to read some of the older archives.

I could mention a couple of others, but the most pertinent (and the one that is causing me to write this right now) is DC Bachelor.  DCB has gone through various personas.  When I started reading his page in 2002 the page was primarily auto-biographical, the reflections of a young recent college grad living in the Washington D.C. area who mostly wrote about going out to Bars in D.C. and Baltimore and trying to meet girls.  The page was funny and I think vaguely was centered around an abstract concept of self-improvement-- sort of a homespun Maxim/G.Q.  The page really centered around this sort of concept for a year or so until I got the impression the author (present persona: DCB) seemed a little down on the whole  "going out" thing.  The page began to be more of a diary of the activities of him and small cast of characters, mostly his male friends including a guy name Som, "Vodka Boy", Eugenius, Yakov, and a couple other dudes.  I'm not sure how to characterize this period completely, but the focus of the page certainly moved away from "self improvement".  I remember the author saying that immediately prior to the shift in content he became really introspective and less interested in socializing and going out.

There was also a period where the page focused a good deal on the author's interest in music.   The author switched to a "DJ Rockinghorse" persona during this period and apparently considered quitting his job as a research chemist to become a DJ in D.C. (he didn't though) and the page sometimes had live streaming music of him mixing stuff or sets available for download. 

At some point his page took somewhat strange turn.  The author IMed or contacted a certain selection of his regular readers (apparently 65 or so people) and asked whether they would be interested in continuing to read the page in a password protected or "underground" format.  Apparently the author had found the page was interferring with his personal life- either things he wrote would be used against him later or he found he censored himself so severely he wrote very little or not much that was interesting.

The "underground" format of the site lasted until sometime a couple months ago.  At first it was pretty awesome.  The author, DCB, definitely felt free to write more and write more candidly about his life when he felt safe with the knowledge of his readership.  Over time though the "underground" format sort of stagnated things.  There was still a core group of us reading the page, but I think we all knew that in that format the size and interests of the audience was fairly fixed- it was mostly guys and topics that involved the most comments involved fighting about politics or the author's new sport bike.  Finally, DCB contacted the readers again to get a feel for taking the site back to a public format, which I doubt any of us objected to (not that he would have listened if we had). 

The present format, DC Bachelor, is sort of a mix of all of these prior formats.  D.C. has developed its own little blogging community and I must say that it is with a strong sense of nerdy but mischevious pride as a long time reader that DCB has emerged as a both a fixture on the scene and also as a bit of a "bad boy" (if there is such a thing in this context).  The page's traffic has also jumped tremendously to being a D.C. area fixture.  All and all I am really happy for DCB that he is enjoying such success, but doing so in a non-sell-out sort of way.

My page has even been linked to as a "Solo Blogger" which of course I am elated about.

Contact Me!

So, Sitemeter totally enthralls me.  I am able to go on and see where people are logging on to my site from and what sites are referring them, assuming they are being referred.  What's really interesting is that although I know the handful of friends and associates who read this page- there is obviously a group of people stumbling upon the page that I do not know.  Well- I encourage you to email me and tell you want you think and who you are...otherwise I will continue to spend an unhealthy amount of time playing with the sitemeter. 

Follow up on Recommendation Post

Adam made the following comment on the recommendation post:

Gary Becker is a brilliant  mind, but beware of his viewpoint being
skewed...he comes from a very particular school of thought, though while
one of the great minds of our time(and I really meant that...Nobel Laureate
in '92 and all) he definitely has a specific view given economic theory.
He is not the end all be all when push come to shove, but he is certainly
an invalubale critical thinker.  It is worth exploring many of his
alternatives.

Thanks for pointing this out Adam.  I will take this opportunity to offer a similar caveat regarding  Judge Posner- he is nationally known, but in fact his fame comes from the fact that he represents a very specific type of legal thought that he is a leader of and representative of.  He is in fact  widely and frequently criticized by other legal scholars, commetators, and even the lowly law student.  Nonetheless,  My point of pointing out the page is more to encourage people to A.) see the fact that such nationally recognized scholars are so readily accessible over the web, B.) to provoke thought and discussion (including critical discussion) of the topics they analyze.

Again- thanks to Adam for offering the insight on the Economics side of things which I am more limited on.  Remind you of Intermediate Micro???  Coping off you again!!!

State of the Blog Address

Greetings faithful readers.  As I ring in a new year I thought I would take a moment to, much like our re-elected commander in chief will do soon no doubt, give you a bit of a state-of-the-blog address. 

This past year has indeed been quite a year for blogging in general, in fact Time named "bloggers" the people of the year.  In addition, The Economist noted recently that the actions of bloggers contributed resignation of CBS anchorman Dan Rather after rather erroneously claimed to have information about President George W. Bush's questionable admission to the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.  As The Economist points out, the rise of the internet sources such as Drudge Report and more basic sites such as blogs is not really an end of liberal media or conservative media, but rather an end of orthodox media in general.  In the past the information industry- be it print or T.V.- was essentially dominated by oligopolies as a result of the cost prohibitive start up costs involved in starting one.  As a result of the internet times have changed.  This site costs less than $4.oo per month and is relatively basic, but it gets the job done.  A more elaborate site could be established for the princely fee of $50 with a hosting fee of $10 a month- hell- you could even hire a consultant like Hugh McLeod from Gaping Void to help you try to drum up readership and even then you would be considering costs utterly crumblike and miniscule compared to a local newpaper, let alone CBS. 

So how does this all relate to Sanity Hearing?  As of right now I am not breaking any secret news stories about Dick Cheney's secret love trysts with Cher nor do I have snap shots of Tara Reid's botched boob implant scars; however, I would like to think that I am at least creating something.  I think, as Hugh McLeod has pointed out, the internet in a lot of ways is about conversations.  When I started law school I read a bunch of websites by law students, especially Mixtape Marathon, as well as some other sites like RLUG that complimented the questions and conversations I had with my real life friends every day.  I think we increasingly live in a surreal kind of world where our contact with other human beings, our friends, and our families is extremely limited.  The internet in many ways is a rebellion against the Orwellian environment we would fall into if we were left only with traditional media and the papers in front of us at our respective cubicles/offices/study rooms.

I hope all of you are enjoying the site.  The statistics seem to indicate that you do:

Total number of hits:	5200
Average per day:	36.36
Today:	80
In the last hour:	1
This week:	171

Blogging Hits The NYTimes

There was an interesting article in the NY Times this Sunday about a blogger and her experiences with dating etc. vis a vis her blog (online edition here).  An interesting article to say the least, although I cannot really relate too much. 

I have met one person who reads my blog in person who I had never met before, which is about the closest thing- I got the impression they were disappointed with me in person actually (what can I say- perhaps I am just different on the internet).

Blogging seems to continue to get more and more chic, which I must say irritates me just slightly because I like blogs and enjoy having one so much that I hope the whole trend is not ruined somehow by a massive influx of posers starting up blogs.  In the meantime, people may be interested to know this site has now had over 4000 hits and is getting around 70-100 hits a day, which is far more than ever in the past.  Thank you all for reading, more exciting observations to come-- especially with the venting that is bound to come as exam season fall '04 will begin post thanksgiving.

Commentary

I have had this blog for a while now, approximately two or three months or so.  I have to admit it has been an interesting experience and I am still really enjoying it.  There have been a lot of things about having this blog though that have been totally unexpected. 

For one thing I never would have imagined how into it I would become nor how often I would mention it at inappropriate times.  When Adam and I were at alumni weekend I am sure Adam can attest to the fact that after a few complimentary beverages I was rattling on to everyone within earshot about my webpage as Adam probably wished he had come to alumni weekend with Russell or Rory or anyone of our college friends whose interest in the internet ends with email and downloadable music and...er..other movies.

Which leads me to my next point, which is that often feel the need to mention to people, "So have you read about this on my webpage?"  Often if they have not it really irritates me.  It is like the kid who comes to class without doing the assigned reading unprepared.  My reaction is- how can I have an intelligent conversation with you now?  Although I try to bring people up to speed at this point, I am ultimately annoyed that my oral explanation rarely lives up to what I posted here.

The other edge of the same sword though is when readers of this site interrupt me when I am talking and say, "Yeah, yeah, I already read about this."  Maybe it is just me, but I have a tendancy to reuse the same conversation with several people in an attempt to be witty and interesting more than once with the same idea.  It saves time and makes me seem smarter, but this does not work as well when when my idea is published for everyone to read on the internet.

Another aspect I never could have predicted was what would get the most commentary.  Ironically I recieved an incredible amount of links to my page, as well as hits, and comments as a result of my quote of Mayor Tom Menino in his infamous cookie speech outside of Fenway.  Next to the Menino post my recent rant about work and a post called "super-bling" probably got the most responses, although personally I do not think any of those posts were my top work.

In conclusion, having a blog has been a lot of fun.  It's probably not for everyone [read: I am a windbag who loves to hear my own thoughts] but I find it rewarding.  I am glad all of you read it and I hope you get enjoyment out of it. 

Interference

From reading other peoples blogs I have heard stories about how having your own website can begin to interfere with your life. The author of a page I have been reading for over 3 years recently password protected his site and basically closed it to the public, thus making it "underground" with access to only a limited audience of 65 or so people. He "closed" the site because apparently his posting began to interfere with his social life so much that he finally felt compelled to prevent certain people from reading about him on the internet. If this become a problem for me I plan to start posting in code and distributing decoder rings to an elite fan club.

However, I have just recently encountered the first incedent of blog-interference in my life. I was out with some friends when the Beatles' All The Lonely People came on and the following conversation ensued:

Me: You know this song was written by the Beatles about their fans?
Friend: Really? That's interesting. A little random.
Me: Well, I'm a wealth of useless knowledge.
Friend [cutting me off]: Yeah, yeah- I know all about that.

So basically I realize that by posting about things on this site I am using up a lot of my "A" material [to which you might say- "This is your A material? Man, you suck." To which I respond, "@#$% you"] so the result will likely be that either the site or my social life suffers. I predict the social life goes before the website does.