This blog has been something floating in the back of my mind for quite some time. It’s been too long since I’ve written anything particularly suited for public consumption. My goal is for this blog to be a (public!) outlet for my thoughts on a whole variety of topics, though the most frequent posts will likely have to do with (a) my search for good coffee and/or travel adventures, (b) my love of writing(/writing in literature/writing in television), and/or (c) my interest in politics/the relationship between media and politics.
My creation of a coffee-inspired blog where I document not only coffee shops and traveling but also writing and news and my views on said news stems from the realization that most of the sites I currently follow are either one world or the other: they are the virtual homes of English majors and lovers of literature, or they are those of political junkies and holders of Strong Opinions. I want to carve out my own little corner of the internet, where I can document not only general life events, but also both of these broad but important aspects of my personality. A good cup of coffee and a good book are just as important to me as a good academic discussion on the nuances of political communication.
My love of both English and politics started in high school and continued to develop throughout my college years. My sophomore year of high school marked the beginning of my first serious foray into creative writing, inspired by a English class journal project on The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which has become one of my favorite books. The project assigned had various components, not all of which I remember, but the main one was to create a journal from the perspective of a eighteen-year-old just drafted into the Vietnam War. Would he flee to Cannda? Go to war? It was the first time I’d ever written creatively where the writing explicitly was meant to be read by someone else. I’d written stories in my head for as long as I could remember, but anything written down was written for me, not others. The assignment made me realize just how much I wanted and needed to write, and how the constraints I’d imposed on what I wrote didn’t need to exist. In college, I explored the other end of the fiction/politics relationship spectrum, examining fiction in politics versus politics in fiction, exploring how misinformation and sometimes outright fiction – intentional or not – often has real world consequences and significant public policy implications. The more I read and know of the world, the more it seems the fictional worlds of literature (defined in the broad sense, to include not only written but film/television) and the ‘real’ world of news and events and politics are intricately linked.
Now a year and a half out of college, I want to get back into writing, into examining the world as I live it and the world as others live it – hence the blog. I fell in love with modernism and post-modernism in college English classes, and in some ways, this blog is a delayed product of that fact: where’s the line between living regular life, having coffee in a coffee shop, and living a life projected to an audience, where everyone directly and indirectly influences each other? I think that line doesn’t exist in the way that it used to exist, and I no longer want to pretend that it does.
This is a New Year’s resolution to which I plan to adhere.