Back Again

Yes, that's right. I'm back - again. And this time I mean business. Why, you ask?* Why, Sean, are you back - you're at grad school. Doesn't that take up most of your time?

*All three of you that will likely read this. Just go with it, for now. I like pretending that more than myself and maybe a random Google bot read this every now and then. Give it time.

You'd be correct, I am at grad school. It does take up most of my time. As I've proven over the years, I am not the greatest at keeping this blog updated even when I do have free time. However, there's a game-changing difference this time around - another blog.

 Yes, for one of my classes here at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at ASU in Phoenix, I've been tasked with developing a blog and writing a weekly post. You can find it here. Ideally, it would have been about sports - since that's what I want to go into - but I couldn't figure out a focus other than "Here are my thoughts about sports." So that's why it's instead about college marching bands, another topic that's near and dear to me - given that I was in one for 4 years. 

So with the forced return to the blogosphere, I've remembered that I do, in fact, have another blog and subsequently immediately felt ashamed that I don't write on here. That's the primary reason, but two other things have additionally tipped the scales towards me investing more time in this site.

One is the level of professionalism that we're now supposed to adhere to in all forms of our online representations. Since this, technically, is an online representation of me - hey, knock it for being obscure, but the professor I TA for found it and used bio info and the profile picture in a introductory PowerPoint - it needed a major facelift. It's still ongoing and not quite as drastic as my last renovation (which included changing the name, the picture, and the color scheme), but my loyal current readership (read: myself and that Google bot) will have noticed some changes already.

One is the introduction of page breaks into the posts, so that each post will now only be blurbed on the home page. Prior to this, each post was fully displayed on the home page - in hindsight, this was messy and involved way too much text. Now each post can be read in full on its own page, while the archive is more easily scrolled through.   

The other change is the shrinking and slight artistic alteration of the picture. I had long been annoyed at how big the picture was and how it pushed the actual blog completely into a place where it needed to be scrolled to, but could never figure out how to shrink it. Now, thanks to the magic of Photoshop - which I finally have access to again after 5 years - I can and did. Consequently, the design looks much better, and you can actually start to see some content without having to scroll down.

The other, slightly more selfish reason I feel a desire to restart this again is my recent discovery of how much I enjoy simply sitting down and writing. I kept a journal on and off growing up, but it always was hard for me to write things other than a travel diary - of which I wrote several - without it seeming almost hackneyed and scripted. My brain was always about 5 steps ahead of my pen, and as a result, nothing ever came across very well. It's cool to look back and get a sense of how I was feeling, but that's all I can ever get now - a sense. I can't feel it. There's a sense of detachment, and I think I was somewhat detached even writing it at the time. For some reason, it took me until the end of school last year to discover this thing called Microsoft Word, in so far as writing personal things was concerned. All of a sudden, I could write nearly as fast as I could think - and my writing got a lot smoother and less forced because of it. I actually began discovering thoughts and ideas while writing, and that was huge for me. It was a lot more effective - and dare I say, therapeutic - than keeping a handwritten journal ever was. One thing led to another, and next thing you know, I'm immensely enjoying spending 70 minutes writing a 2200-word essay to a friend updating her on my adventures out here in the Valley of the Sun. I really think that in many ways I've rediscovered my passion for writing - which is good, considering I want to go into journalism - and this blog, while still probably heavily relating to sports, will hopefully allow me to continue to have a creative outlet for that passion.

And I can tell that I really mean it this time, because when I set out to write this post about half an hour ago, I meant to write about 3 paragraphs. See what happens? But I like it, and that's why I do it. Hopefully, you'll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.