And now back to your (not so) regularly scheduled program...

Hello again, dear readers,
It has effectively been a year and a half since my last post and I'm toying with the idea of starting up with this whole blogging thing again. I have been thinking about it for maybe a year or so, but every time I write down "blog" on my to-do list, it always seems to end up getting trumped by something else. The thing is, inspiration strikes me more often than the opportunity to travel arises, so maintaining a blog in real-life will be a new - and challenging - experience for me. In the past, I have blogged solely during my travels -- it served not only as a way to keep in touch with friends and family but also as an easy way to share my experiences and invite further commentary on my ruminations.

I remember one time, in an Italian literature class I took in college, I read that the concept of an autobiography is doomed from the start. It was while we were reading Italo Calvino's La coscienza di Zeno, a story of a man named Zeno who writes his autobiography as an exercise given to him by his psychotherapist to help with his treatment. Near the end of the story (no spoilers ahead), Zeno identifies an intrinsic problem with the literary genre of "autobiography." He explains that in the time it takes someone to catch someone up to the 'present-day,' there is an interval of time that has elapsed between the present-day of the autobiography and the present-day of reality. Thus, no one is ever truly capable of writing an autobiography that contains any part of the present, since the present is forever changing, and the literary present will never catch up to that of real time. For some reason, this notion has always stuck with me.

Whenever I wrote a blog during my travels, I always felt "caught up" as I left the internet cafe, almost as if it were time to go create more experiences that would undoubtedly make their way into future posts. In writing those posts, however, anything that may have occurred during those hours in the internet cafe got shelved since, essentially, there could always be someone or something to write about and, at some point, you just have to decide what makes the cut. Otherwise, people would never *stop* writing, but then again, they might have very little to write about if they lack the time to actually live. It's a strange, roundabout logic, really. I even think that sometimes I made more of an effort to "do stuff" since I knew I would be writing about it, and I didn't want to have "nothing good" to write about, because, well, that's just boring...and I don't want to be boring (does anyone?).

For now, the important part to me is recognizing that every time I published a post in the past, I felt caught up (both with updating my readers and with sorting out recent encounters or experiences). I also looked forward to seeing the commentaries and insights shared by my readers. In that vein, I hope to elicit more commentaries and more perspectives this time around (which may or may not be "a time," but, rather, the new beginning of my blogger self).

Anyway, I hope all of you readers feel strongly enough about something I write here to share your own thoughts. I use this forum not as a diary, but as a place where I can give shape to my observations/experiences/etc. with the hope that they then inspire others to do the same. I make no guarantees about how frequently I will post, but since observations and experiences (and especially "et cetera") come in many shapes and sizes, that kind of keeps it interesting. I promise I will never post just for the sake of posting; what's the point of that?

So, I think I'm gonna give it a go, see where it takes me. After all, you never know if you don't try.