Tag: blogday

Decade

/ dmueller / 3 Comments

This, THIS, is what it feels like to celebrate a 10th blogiversary. And how it feels to read an entry on a ten-year-old–hang on a second…feeling overexcited…now catching my breath…blog. And how it feels to leave a comment on a ten-year-old blog (c’mon, people, when was the last time?). Also a glimpse of how well (or poorly?!) Movable Type has aged.

Well?

Seems like I should be able to come up with somethinganything important sounding, some epideictic gloss on all that blogging has been and all that it will be, on how blogging has died and come back and died again and come back so many times since about 2006 that it’s hard to keep track of whether it is alive or dead right now. Let me guess: alive. Proof enough that blogs, until deleted or lost in upgrades and platform roulette or suspended in an ambiguous cryogenic limbo, are their own dead-living monuments.

Exactly ten years ago I was applying to PhD programs. Owned a house on Missouri 9 Highway in Kansas City. Coached Ph.’s 7th grade basketball teams (Stampede Green and Stampede Blue). Taught as a part-time lecturer. Now am going up for tenure. Own a house in Ypsilanti. And I wear an old Stampede Blue winter hat when I jog the neighborhood in sub-50F weather. Turning over from a 9-ending to a big-0 birthday, myself, in a few months, blog.

I know the entries aren’t evenly spread across these ten years (nor are they likely to be for the next 10 years, although I promise a much bigger celebration in 2024), but thank goodness EWM marked off and has therefore helped me remember what happened, and happened, and happened. Just ten years in, I’m thinking, whatever else this is, it’s memory.

Can’t Miss

/ dmueller

Posting a blogday commemorative at a quarter of ten on the last day of winter break and after a particularly slow blogyear feels like the felicitations equivalent of realizing on the way home from work that it’s your kid’s ninth birthday and stopping by Circle K to pick up–surprise!–as gifts a small cherry slush and a Slim Jim. Nevertheless. Earth Wide Moth is nine, and that still matters around here. “Here” meaning the blog. May the blogpace quicken–or at the very least stay its measured speed–over the months to come.

Pinata before the BOOM!

Manic Monfri

/ dmueller

Most notable about EWM’s sixth year (2009, plus a few days) is that never in a month did I write more than ten entries. I don’t know whether this is more a comment on the blog or a comment on the year or a comment on their irreconcilability, their mismatch. Whatever the causes, there was less, less than any year before considering every other annual cycle consisted of 10+ monthly entries. 2009: Tweets a-bunch, blogs abyss.

Indeed, today marks another blogday, and since I haven’t missed announcing any previous blogday, I feel an obligation to mention the historic occasion (everything, after all, is more impactful if “historic”). Cake? No. We will celebrate at home later with leftover cod chowder (simple, delicious, i.e., better than expected), cheddar biscuits, and if somebody else feels like baking them, brownies. Today also happens to be a Monfri to top all Monfries: the first day of the first week of the new semester at EMU and, for me, the last day of the first week of the new semester at EMU. Frenzied, manic. Monfri, the average of Monday and Friday, their median, or Wednesday, depending on how you mark it in your day planner. Monfri, the grue moon of academe. No telling whether today is also EWM’s Monfri, the critical moment mid-distant between its initiation and its termination. No telling.

I’m teaching ENGL328 this semester, again unpicking the triple squareknot at the intersection of writing, style, and technology. Introducing myself in the first class this morning, I mentioned that I’m looking forward to re-establishing a regular reading and writing schedule this winter (perhaps it sounded like “irregular” as I said it). It’s not that I neglected to read and write in the fall, exactly. But I wouldn’t describe those four months as acceptably disciplined or scheduled. Not up to my standards, anyway. And I gather, hints and clues, that it’s typical in first years of new appointments to experience an irregular stride, an arrhythmia attributable to figuring things out, getting bearings, settling.

Best Of, Vol. 4

/ dmueller / 4 Comments

Tomorrow will mark four year’s worth of blogging1. The
latest one-year cycle generated 204 entries, five more than I posted
the year before
(the exams-encumbered season of 2006). From the most recent round, here
are the best entries, as judged by a distinguished panel of loyal E.W.M. readers
and enthusiasts2.

Best Titles

  1. Shar-Pei of
    May
  2. Michshapen
  3. Heeling Arts
  4. Picktaneous
    Bracketbustion
  5. Cliff Stitched
    the Lip

Profound Sentiments

  1. Walking the
    Walk
  2. Long Jump
  3. #0033BD
  4. At Seven Mos.
  5. Y.

Funniest E.W.M Comic

  1. Hearing,
    Jack-o
  2. Kibble
    Debacle

World-Changing Ideas

  1. Databasic
    Writing
  2. Did Bitzer
    Draw?
  3. Writers House
  4. How Far Can We
    Drift?
  5. Chreod:
    Alignment of Set-ups

1 The official and certified
blogday of Earth Wide Moth is January 4, but because the first-ever entry is
date-stamped January 6, the latter date is the observed blogday.
2 Due to a
sharp drop-off
in reader loyalty during the 2007 blogging cycle, Best Of Vol. 4 entries were
selected more or less randomly, according to the whimsy of, well, me.