Tuesday, October 21, 2008

So it begins!

This marks the first entry in what I hope will be a blog chronicling my various misadventures and travels. Lately I've really felt the need to capture and put down what I see around me - maybe because everything feels so transient! Moving to a new city and starting "real life" has been a lot more eye opening than I thought it would be really...Little did I know graduating from college would instill in me not disillusionment and confusion, but a furious sense of wonder and awe in the face of the massive world I now find in front of me. It seems like every day I discover new things I want to do and see and my appetite for new experiences seems to grow and grow every day. Jesus, if I had known I'd have so much time and the world was so full I would have fucking dropped out of college ages ago! Anyway, since I arrived here in Minneapolis, my new home city, I've found myself wandering (and trespassing!) all over the city, and I wanted to have a place to document all the junk I've seen. I wanted to have one place to compile pictures, thoughts, whateve.r So that's what this little blog-y thing is for. Twoohoohoo!

I don't intend to update super frequently, or to write lengthy entries detailing every thought I have and every moment of my day. In fact, I was a little trepidatious about starting a blog period. I had shied away from it until now because it seemed way too easy to get obsessed with the whole "blogosphere" concept, which I find obnoxiously pretentious not to mention small-minded. All the petty internet bickering and nit picking and UGH. Spare me. Don't get me wrong...I'm not one of those romantics who curses the downfall of "true" experience in the advent of the internet age. I think the internet is one of the most amazing, democratic things out there! Do I love googling Paris Hilton sex tapes at 3 am? OH YES I DO!!! The ability to reach websites from every tiny corner on earth at any time of day is probably one of the most terrific things to exist in this world. 

That said, on a personal level I think I feel better when I'm living...how do I put this...in 3-D. A lot of what I've been doing is turning away from the easy, 2D things I've taken for granted in favor of real life things that let me put my face right in the middle of all the goings-on. Right now I'm all about the microcosm, the minute, the local, the unknown, the undiscovered. That extends from everything to what I eat to where I plan on traveling. Let me just give you an example: instead of downloading music for free over the internet (which god knows I love, both for its ease and its price tag), I have taken to checking out CDs from my local library (which has a surprisingly good music collection). I get to have a physical object (cd, case, liner notes, etc.) in my hot little hand. And I've discovered that being able to touch and "see" the music I'm hearing makes me feel like I'm getting more than just recorded sound - after looking at the cover and the lettering and the liner notes the band has included, I start to associate images and a certain mood with the album, almost as though through osmosis, that I couldn't have gotten from just downloading the music. 

ANWAY, I'm not doing this so I can put one more "cooler than you" notch in my belt or so I can secretly feel better than everyone who downloads music on the internet...it came more out of a simple discovery that being a child of the internet age has sort of muddled my sense of context for a lot of things, and so I've set out on a crusade to contextualize my world. I want to know how we went from The Jesus and Mary Chain to You Say Party! We Say Die! It comes out of my own desire to understand all the stuff I see around me in a way that makes sense to me.  

The weird thing is, documenting this turn towards slowness in my own life VIA the internet seems right, if only in some roundabout way. In my own mind, it makes sense that I would at once blend a turning back towards slow things (food, music, books, films, etc.) with the hugeness and generality of the internet. That seems like the perfect summation of the current moment we are in. 

And with that, onward!