Notablog.blogspot.com

Is what we originally were going to make the url for this not a blog. Except, on this 21st century soapbox of Blogger, that was of course already taken. So was notanotherblog.blogspot.com, notablogblog.blogspot.com, notanotherblogblog.blogspot.com, thisisnotablog.blogspot.com etc. etc. The point is, this is as cliche as you get (luckily that url wasn't already taken, by some miracle of irony, or ironic miracle, or moronic miracle), and we, Leo and Jake, world-famous columnists of the once daily Spectator and apologists of all things oppressive in the world, understand that.

So why are we doing it. That's a good question. First off, finally we can write what we want to without editors, meaning tons of run-on sentences (with unnecessary parenthetical sections—emdashes galore, and horribly un-fact checked assertions). Second off, we want to keep in touch with each other, and understanding that people might read this for the first couple weeks or so and slowly taper off, we'll have our own platform to keep in contact that's not Facebook messaging (which really just always makes you feel bad about yourself, what with it's guilt-inducing timestamps knowing that either someone read what you had to say and didn't respond, or that they know that you read their message and didn't respond) or Skype (studies have shown that in only 8% of Skype conversations do both parties pay attention for the entire time and not secretly play 2048 in the background). But really, the third and least likely reason for the "blog" is that, as Jake said, all the people we care about in the world are being scattered to the corners of the world, or to the bowels of Midtown office buildings, and we want to keep in touch with everybody, and share what we're doing, with slightly more thought and description than an e-mail chain. Which means that although Jake and I are the primary contributors to the site, we really want other people to post their experiences and thoughts on post-grad life, pictures, prose, whatever. This probably won't end up happening, but it's a nice idea, right? 

The specific reason that I'm trying to keep a log of my experiences and thoughts is for the same reason I did a column throughout college—writing is really one of the only ways that I can really rationalize the irrational (just kidding). But really, it's easy to experience and filter things on a day-to-day level, but on a larger scale, putting everything into context and understanding everything happening to you is a pretty impossible task (and maybe an unnecessary one, but still something useful to attempt). Writing forces you to think because, even if in your mind it seems like everything's in order, once you try to put these thoughts down into somewhat coherent sentences, you really you have no idea about anything (at least, that's my experience). The more you try to shape coherent sentences, the more you're able to make sense of the abstract.

Which was already a fairly large task in college, with all that period of growth and transition and blah blah blah, but jesus, post-grad life is in a completely different realm so far. About a month ago, we were going through the spectacle of graduation week, attempting to stay up every night and have too emotional talks about college and the future and everything. Then I was home for a little. And then I took a flight to San Francisco where I got on a twenty person, propellor plane that felt like it was going down every time we hit turbulence, miraculously eventually landing in Redmond, Oregon. And for the past month, I've been working for the forest service in the Deschutes National Forest of Central Oregon, which is so diametrically opposed to New York culture, and so different than the rest of my life up to this point, that I sort of have been just going with it and not really stopping to think. Which is easy, because this is the most beautiful country I have ever been to in my life. So I think that's why I've taken so long to set this up—I knew I'd have to eventually write this introductory post, and then subsequent posts, and have to finally face everything happening right now—being in Central Oregon, working for the forest service and the Americorps and the Student Conservation Association, being 3,000 miles from just about all my previous relationships in life, and most of all finally being in the "real world."

So if you've made it to the end here (and I will ramble now, because I no longer have world limits, so I'll try to put the most interesting things in the first half from now on), here's the point: this is as cliche as you get, but if you've ever read anything Jake and I have written, we love the cliche, and embrace it to the best of our abilities. No matter what Jake says, this blog will be filled almost exclusively with trite anecdotes and hackneyed philosophical musings, and we're going to enjoy writing them. Because we're going to be doing some pretty fucking cool things over the next year (not just us two, all of us) and we want to hear about them. So please read and contribute. 

"Things they do look awful c-c-c-cold..."

Our generation has a loneliness problem, and we stutter articulating it.  Every successive crop of people our age has a tiny Romantic desire to engage in something so profound that it can only be miscommunicated. For us this takes the form of placing an upturned hand on a sweaty forehead and declaring that we must work one-hundred-hour weeks at an investment bank, or uproot and move to the Oregon wilderness, or flee to Germany, etc, etc. Getting a job isn't enough. There is a new requirement of cool for college-educated millennials that is enough send us all over the world and into the bowels of office buildings. Basically anywhere away from each other.

So our kind of loneliness is not the T. S. Eliot I-will-show-you-fear-in-a-handful-of-dust kind of loneliness. We have mores, we have values, we have friends. Tons of friends. But we don't get to see them after we graduate, because they're either at work or in Japan or some other place comically far from and different from New York.

One way that our generation tries to combat this stupid, completely self-imposed but still completely woeful loneliness is the travel blog. Ah, the travel blog. The travel blog is a totally self-indulgent declaration of self-importance. A travel blog is a very loud, very annoying assumption that people actually care about what you're doing and what you had for breakfast and what color your shit was on Tuesday. Nobody does. But time after time, over and over, dull, myopic millennials believe themselves to be the exception. "I will write a travel blog that isn't super fucking annoying," they think, quite erroneously. "Generations to come will read my shitty travel blog to better understand the human condition."

Well, Leo and I are not so susceptible to these delusions of grandeur. In fact, we find the idea of a travel blog completely abhorrent. Which is why I would like to say loud and clear--in my most unequivocal tone (and I have many)--that this is not a blog. Yes, we are using Blogger to write it. Yes, it has all of the normal accoutrements of a blog. But these are purely logistical tools, and you can rest assured that this is, once again, definitely not a blog. Really this is more of a self-published literary magazine with only two contributors. Or it might gratify you to think of this as a Greek epic, written in English, stripped of its meter, broken up into smaller bits and entirely based on true events. Still others prefer to understand this as a series of short films without all of the pesky images and sounds.

However you'd like to understand this entity, just keep in mind that it is absolutely not a blog. And we will not bore you with trite anecdotes or hackneyed philosophical musings. We will not succumb to twenty-first-century loneliness. We are absolutely not millennials falling into the same trap that befalls the rest of our g-g-generation. And we will not stutter articulating it.