Blog Fodder to Spare

Earlier this week, I stood in Dr. Miller’s office chatting about our blogs. Dr. Price and I had just recently posted our first entries, and Dr. Miller commented that he had been waiting for us to do that, so that he could go ahead and write another one—he had lots of things he’d been thinking of writing about. He was just finishing up his second entry.

It’s funny that we would be waiting on each other to take turns. I wonder if we’re playing by some unspoken rules of politeness or if it’s just that none of us wants to look too terribly nerdy. (Nerdily competitive: I had entertained hopes of being the first to post during this second round. Oh well.)

And we are nerdy, and in wonderfully fulfilling ways. How fun to have colleagues to write with, to have given ourselves occasion and audience to encourage our own writing.

We laughed a lot—at ourselves and our enthusiasm. I commented that several events had recently struck me as good “blog fodder.” I didn’t elaborate then, but on my mind were my only niece’s recently heading off to college for her first semester; preseason football, Deuce’s sideline cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and my hopes that he can stay healthy for one whole, good season; the way our English Department workshop reminded me how much like our students we faculty sometimes are. I wanted to write about all of those and more.

What I did say to Dr. Miller was this: “I should probably write up a bunch of these right now and save them for later in the semester. Then when crunch time comes, I’ll have something to post.”

We laughed some more at that—this time not nerdily, but rather the kind of knowing-and-empathizing laughter that accompanies confessions of weakness, admissions of understandable guilt.

We all know that as enamored as we are with the blogs right now, and probably with the sounds of our own voices, a semester’s worth of momentum is tricky to maintain. At some point each of us, I suspect, will be busy and distracted and will see the blog as an extra task that takes extra time.

That’s a good reminder for me, here at the beginning, as I shape each of my classes. It doesn’t mean that, come mid-term or Thanksgiving, I’ll be willing to “let up” on either myself or my students. Rather, it means that we will all have to keep our eyes open for those moments that inspire us, that give us something to say, that make us want to write.