Welcome

Welcome, all!

This page is the next step in the evolution of how I engage the world online. This is not my first attempt at writing online. Most significantly, I journaled my experience in Teach For America. But for the first time, I plan to be intentional about addressing an audience beyond just myself and the people I know personally.

I’ve been writing for a long time now. I got my start on Internet message boards. It was a safe way to express my opinions and debate people, while not really being exposed. Even though I never tried to hide my identity on a message board, I generally interacted with people who I’d likely never encounter in real life. Writing was always my weakest subject in school, but many years of practice have given me a lot more confidence. And the interactivity of writing in public forums has taught me a lot about how to craft and critique arguments.

With Facebook, I began to take a bit more risk. My friends and family know me to be fairly opinionated and outspoken. That probably seems like a fairly normal thing to most people, but it is very different from my personality growing up. I spent those years fairly obsessed with not standing out. So, taking stands on issues in front of people who actually know me was a big change from my comfort zone. Today, I do this routinely.

At some point, I realized that all of the reading, thinking, and writing I do have made me pretty good at this. And I started to believe that what I say might actually have the potential to change the way other people see things. I’ve even been told so by a small handful of people, which has been really encouraging.

Moreover, I began to see communicating as a responsibility. For Facebook posts where I’d really put some thought in, I started setting the privacy to “Public” to allow friends to share more widely. You can see these posts on my Facebook profile. On a recent such post, one of my friends challenged me to begin blogging.

And so, here it is. For sure, I plan to use this to publish my thoughts on things I feel have societal importance. The contentious stuff. If you know me at all, you know I’m absolutely horrified that in little more than a week, Donald Trump will be President of the United States of America. You can count on politics being a major theme of this website.

But I might also use it to put out my thoughts on more lighthearted fare, like tech and travel. We’ll see! Anyway, thanks, in advance, for reading.