On Blogging and Travel

I've always been a little bit weary of blogging. I don't know whether this has more to do with:

a) my general fear of computers, or
b) a legitimate concern about what happens when the public and the private collide in a messy swirl of confessional teenage angst on xanga.com.

However, though admittedly curious, I never started my own blog until required to for a literary criticism class in my last semester of college. That blog was a "literary" blog, and, though it was challenging to think and write about, ohh say, Virginia Woolf's ideas on the androgynous mind for a few months, I don't think I will be continuing in that vein. This next foray into blogging will be personal. And that's where the trouble begins. I have always wondered how people can authentically record their lives in a diary-like format online when they so obviously write for an audience. There's a certain comfort about putting pen to journal page and knowing that those words are truly your own until you die. Unless you have intrusive and overly concerned parents or a nosey sibling, you can rely on the fact that what you write is mostly unguarded. You can curse and cry and not worry about how others may perceive what you have to say. Blogging, well... esa es otra cosa. It's a whole different ball game. It's all about the audience. Your friends, your family, and that potential audience... the potential that a stranger may stumble upon your page and step into the carefully presented fragments of your life.

Concerns about how genuinely or humbly I can write about my own journey throughout the next year aside, I am excited about trying my hand at blogging. Two of my roommates are going into the Peace Corps and will be keeping blogs. Other friends are sorting out their post-college lives and blogging about it. I am jumping onto the blogging bandwagon with gusto, in the hopes of keeping up with friends' lives as they document the next step into the real world. Exciting stuff! Let's just hope that blogging doesn't become for me as soul-sucking as facebook has proven itself to be.

On a different note, as I was searching for names for this blog, I came upon a list of the "50 most inspiring travel quotes of all time." Here are some of my favorites:

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” - William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” - Lillian Smith

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” - Paul Theroux