One-year

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this site’s transition to WordPress, and, thus, the one-year anniversary of my beginning to blog in earnest. This is a good opportunity to reflect on some stuff I’ve learned and look to the future of this site and my interests.

I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with this blog. I began by using it as sort of a journal of my actions and thoughts. Coupled with the WordPress client for iPhone, I did a fair amount of spontaneous and short blogging, expressing ideas I had, things I saw, and so forth. As school began, I started becoming more introverted, focusing on the way I felt (usually being under a lot of stress, as it was senior year). In January, my iPhone was stolen, and I lost the ability to blog at anytime. I started blogging almost compulsively when I got home every day, almost as a way to let out my feelings. Because of everything that was going on at school, it felt good to have a place to write about what I thought it all mean. Sometimes it’s hard to articulate that sort of stuff when you’re still in it. You need to take a step back. Blogging has definitely helped me do that, in other areas of my life as well.

When I got a new iPhone in early July, I started using Twitter for uses other than just tracking this blog, and shortly thereafter joined Facebook. Now I use those as two methods of communication (they’re closely integrated), and have begun to regard this blog as more of a place for contemplative, well though-out concepts or arguments. A lot of my writing has been inspired by the increasing amount of other blogs I’ve been reading, including Paul Krugman‘s The Conscience of a Liberal, Jewschool, CAP, andClimate Progress, to name a few. In a lot of cases, doing this writing has helped me solidify my own thoughts on subjects, and opened my mind to new points of view.

In the future, I want to blog more regularly than I have been recently; at least a couple times a week. Interestingly, it was easier for me to blog regularly during the school year than it has been now. I’m planning to blog a couple times next week from the NHC Summer Institute about the program and some issues that I will be considering during my time there. There’s a plan for facilitation of a dialogue about the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although I don’t really like calling it that), so I’m expecting to get some interesting stuff out of that.

As I begin school, I will almost definitely be undergoing some serious life changes in terms of how I spend my time and what I work on. I intend to keep this blog an important component of my work and thoughts, and I hope to attract a wider audience as I meet new people and discover new ideas.

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year in many ways. I look forward to many more.