(Post by Tom)
Well, dear readers, we have good news for you all. After a hiatus of several months, this blog is finally creaking back to life. The invisible Internet gears that make this page work were allowed to rust over and collect cobwebs, but we’re firing up the ignition and making them run again.
We will wait here patiently while all nine of you take to the streets in a fit of celebratory dancing. You have five minutes.
The reasons for reviving this blog are plenty; a few might even be interesting. I will dispense with the first and most blatantly narcissistic right away: I am determined to write more regularly (as I'm assuming Tracy also is). This blog is a space to do that. (Plus, I heard that “self-absorbed ramblings pumped out by people trying to fulfill boring personal goals” is the most commonly searched phrase in Google, and I am never one to stand in the way of giving the public what it demands.)
The second is a matter of pride. A favorite pastime of ours is finding the corpses of long-defunct blogs, of which the Internet is full to bursting. It is depressingly easy; just type a random URL into your browser (like, say, “puppylover.blogspot.com” or “pigsinablanket.blogspot.com”) and see what pops up. I would bet dollarstodonuts.blogspot.com that whatever you find will not have been touched in at least three years. These bastard children of ambition and inertia are everywhere; they seem to be the Internet’s most plentiful natural resource. We do not want this blog to join the multitudes in the graveyard of good intentions.
Of course, because this blog was originally conceived of as a way to document a trip that ended about six months ago, it could probably be argued that it should pass on into Internet purgatory. But there are still things about our experience worth writing about. Yes, you guessed it: though we’ve arrived at our destination, our journey will never truly be over.
The challenge, for me at least, will be to write posts that are more than just digitized navel-gazing (“digitized navel-gazing,” by the way, was what the Internet was originally going to be called), or the equivalent of a never-ending Christmas letter. This can seem crushingly overwhelming at times, because everything has already been said by someone somewhere. But we’re going to give it a try.
Although, I also think it would be hilarious if the “final words” of this blog consisted of an explicit vow not to let it die an un-mourned death. So, you know, it’s sort of a win-win deal.
Next episode: “A Mild Case of Homesickness.”
