Wednesday, July 09, 2014

milemarker addendum

In the last few days, the idea of reintegrating my various online selves has seemed tempting.

But for the most part, I'd been thinking about my reddit persona, my twitter persona and my "ostensibly real" facebook persona.

Each of those are modern social-networking identities, that communicate with the intention of interacting, rather than just blogging out ideas, unilaterally.

This blog identity is a lot older than the other three, and especially before 2007, revels in ideas.

Not sure if and when it will really make sense to reconcile them all--beyond of course, in me, the existing human dude.

Part of me worries that I will actually be interested in pursuing politics in some capacity in the future, and that having all of the ill advised things I said in anonymized persona linked to a public persona could be bad news.

But really, I should be working on taking pictures of the ephemera of my Japan decade to sell them to strangers.

July 9, 2014 milemarker

It's not just me. Blogging seems to be dead. Even writing posts saying you're going to come back to your blog now, or someday soon is passe.

We write on facebook and twitter now. We don't post unless we have a picture or can squeeze our thoughts into 140 characters.

So, its little surprise that this blog has sat dead for so long. Realistically, it won't be "alive" for long. I'm writing this entry because I popped by and looked at some of my old entries from 2006 and before, then my more recent entries between 2007 and 2010, and felt a little embarrassed.

I used to mix a little snark in with a great deal of philosophical curiosity and concern with "depth" topics. Somewhere not long after moving to the big city, I seem shallow, over confident and hopelessly mired in what was immediately in front of me. I became a less interesting, less thoughtful person.

Maybe I'm on the road to rectifying that now.

After 8 years in Tokyo feeling like I had somehow won the prize, I'm finally leaving -- hopefully to pull myself out of this particular set of distorted circumstances, and maybe accomplish something.

Today, though, I'm home sick, and the biggest task I'm going to accomplish is taking pictures of some stuff I need to sell or give away before I leave this city, country, cycle of desire and gratification, etc.


If for some reason writing publicly and at length about my daily thoughts becomes an appealing prospect in the next several months, this blog might become the story of a:

35-year old law student
in Texas
experiencing reverse culture shock
trying to reconcile his beliefs developed in exile with the "real America"
and thinking hard about money