Blogging

I wonder how many of these things begin with something like, "I can't believe I'm starting my own blog." I suppose it's not very original but it is how I feel right now. It's hard for me to articulate exactly why I'm doing this. Several people have heard my anti-blogging rants -- how they're for navel-gazing narcissists, how they're self-indulgent, how I don't understand that people would want to make public their useless, quotidian observations and verbal diarrhea.

I guess now I either take myself a little less seriously or I just want to board the narcissistic, self-indulgent diarrhea train along with everyone else. Either way, I can't believe I'm starting my own blog.

One major factor in shifting my attitude about this weirdly democratic, pubic/personal journal practice has been Darlene Young's writing at www.apersonnamedeunice.blogspot.com. Darlene is a long-distance friend of mine that I met through the Association of Mormon Letters and her work is well-written, charming, self-deprecating, sometimes funny, sometimes thought provoking. Rather than being self-conscious about the act of writing, she just writes and does it well. Every morning when I come into work, I check my regulars: cnn.com, slate.com, popmatters.com, and her site. I'm always excited when I see that it's been updated and there's some new piece of writing about her family, a new e-mail survey she's filled out, or a new picture of somewhere she's been or someone she knows. I don't know Darlene that well. We've only met face to face once and it was a couple of years ago but I see what she does and I admire it and want to emulate it. As Jon Lovitz/Harvey Fierstein used to say on SNL, "Is that so wrong?"

So here I am on a steamy Detroit afternoon on the second floor of the parish house at St. Edward's Episcopal Church ot the corner of Trumbull and Michigan, kitty corner from the giant, rotting husk that is Tiger Stadium. It was foggy and overcast all morning long but now the sun has broken through and the temperature has already surpassed the projected high of 80 degrees by a few notches. Off in the distance, as I usually can, I hear sirens. Sometimes they're far off, sometimes they go blaring by my open window like the entire world is coming to an end. It's gotten to the point where I don't bat an eye when they pass by. When I first started here a year ago, I'd go to the window, crane my neck around, and look to see if somebody had been shot or stabbed or run over in the road. Now I pause long enough for the noise to pass and then I go back to teaching.

I find a perverse sense of pride in working and going to school in downtown Detroit. It is so utterly removed from my experience as a white, Mormon kid growing up in small, rural Rexburg, Idaho that I am occasionally astounded by my life. It's not glamorous by any stretch to live and work here but, for me, a kid whose hometown didn't have a building over three stories tall, to walk down Michigan Avenue to the Compuware building (where Suzanne works) on a humid afternoon is a thrill. It's exciting and interesting to me to be in such a radically different place.

So Detroit is going to be the setting of this little blog. I live in Livonia which, ironically enough, is one of the whitest suburbs its size in the nation but I spend almost all of my waking hours here. (Plus, this is where I have the computer access.) So Detroit it is.