Has it really been a year?

Completely unrelated to this post, or, clickbait: Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn

I just came to the realization that this blog started one year ago next month. In that year, our kids have grown from six to eighteen months old. While raising the Wonder Twins, my wife and I have grown a year older, but likely not any wiser, just more exhausted, frazzled, and incoherent. That and the header image remind me: anyone want to babysit for us so I can see Suicide Squad this summer? Anyway, in the last year I've also started writing for a website, Sequart, which has been terrifically fulfilling and fun. I fear it's taken what little time I have to write away from this blog, though, and for that I'm sorry. I had intended to fill this space with a mixture of things that mattered to me: the occasional personal reflection on my life, my family, and even my struggles and anxieties, along with more lighthearted pieces on pop culture and it's influence and impact on us. Well, the latter subject matter has kind of taken over this blog, mostly because it's on my mind a lot due to the articles that I'm writing for Sequart. Recently I received a review copy from St. Martin's Press for the essay collection Last Night, A Superhero Saved My Life and a review copy of the buzz-worthy new novel A Hundred Thousand Worlds is on its way to me from Viking Press/Penguin Books. This means that when I write again soon, it will more than likely be in the form of reviews of these books, hopefully to finding a home at Sequart. I've realized that writing about pop culture that helps shape us is just as personal as writing about a moment from our youth that left an equally strong impression on us. It's all part of what makes up our personalities, our souls.

There's also a bit of self-preservation at work when I write what these personal reflections from a pop cultural obsessive. It's not that it's easier to write about myself while in theory writing about something else, a work of some sort, but it does provide just the slightest mask that I can still use to hide behind, just a bit. Old introverted ways die hard, or in fact never actually die, they just take brief vacations but always return home. Late last year I wrote about a summer during college, one particularly eventful time in my young life that, unbeknownst to me then, was a turning point in my life. I can look back on that summer today and realize that's when I began accelerating my growth into the person that I am now. That was a really hard piece to write. It was dredging up emotions and memories I hadn't thought of in ages. They were almost universally good memories, but it's still hard to look back at your younger self and see who you were, warts and all, on full display. But I want to try it again someday, and this blog is the spot where I'll do that.

So, thanks for reading me here and elsewhere over the last year, and for understanding that blogging isn't about over-sharing, or complaining, or venting, but instead is about working things out one word at a time in order to make some sort of meaning out of the absurdity of this thing we call life.

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