After a self-imposed month of absence in June and a carryover helping of apathy lasting halfway into July, today I return. (Like Harry Potter, only with less fanfare.) A voluntary writing ban can last for only so long before disintegrating in a cloud of rusty word-dust. I say rusty because I am. Over a month ago I began posting on my new Tumblr feed (as well as significantly stepping up my Twitter prolificacy), and — due to my utter lack of practice elsewhere — I’d never gotten so much enjoyment out of devising captions.
Notwithstanding my two-pronged double-T social networking pastimes (tweeting and tumbling happily along, I did), long-form writing beckoned, and so here I am. In the blogosphere (I hate that word), long-form can actually mean something approaching book-length, but here I only use it to distinguish these missives here from their more concise 140-character counterparts.
By the way, I just discovered that WordPress has added Google’s +1 button as a sharing option for posts now. This brings me to a somewhat related point, which is that my Houdini-like vanishing act from this blog in June precipitated quite a foray into social networking in general. Google+’s launch roughly coincided with my “blogstinence,” and Twitter helped fill that gaping void known as narcissism-deprivation as well. I also recently acquired a Spotify account and have slowly begun reentering the chaotic and mostly annoying world of Facebook. “Hello, world,” indeed.
I can tell this post is going nowhere, so now’s as good a time as any to wrap things up. But suffice it to say that you should expect to see more of me in the very near future, cobbling together spare consonants, vowels, and the occasional exclamation mark toward whatever ends I please — which theoretically could be absolutely anything, and in practice will consist almost entirely of jokes likening Mitch McConnell to a Thanksgiving turkey.
Oh, and one more thing. I’m moving to Paris next month for grad school. My girlfriend is moving to Alaska for a law clerkship just days before. This seems (and is) vaguely ridiculous, but we’re staying together, which isn’t at all. So I would remind you (and by you I refer, of course, to exactly no one) that, if you could forgive my unannounced sabbatical last month, I would kindly thank you to equally absolve me of any sub-par upcoming performances, which will no doubt include fits and starts and the occasional sputtering “I can’t speak the language and I’m going to fail all my classes.” The first part will be true (at least at the beginning), and hopefully not the second.
I have never read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, although I’m about to, but yesterday a former French professor emailed me its opening line as a sort of benediction for the coming year: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,” Hemingway writes, “then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
And with that, I bid you good night.
