Todo Tiene Su Como-Se-Llama

Feliz Cumpleaños, Blog!

I have been blogging for exactly one year as of today. I tried to combine all of the entries into a single document once (there are over 200 of them now) so I could slap some kind of recognizable amount value on how much I have written. It didn't really work and the only thing I really figured out is that I've written an enormous frigging ton.

And I'm sure you didn't know that, huh?

Anyway, I thought a bit about how I wanted to do this. It's been a fun year . . . I've enjoyed myself immensely, not only in the living of it, but especially in the writing about it. In the end I decided on . . . Well, not a "Year in Review" post so much, actually.

I have chosen 30 different posts: my 10 favorite random posts, the 10 posts that describe the best (read: "most fun") or most important events of the last year, and my 10 favorite posts that deal with my passion (read: "major"), literary analysis in some form or another of whatever narrative had my attention at the time.

Beneath the fold, if you're interested, I have them all linked. I have included the title, date and time of posting, and a brief descriptor paragraph for each.

Whether anyone else is interested in having a look or not, I enjoyed reading through what is essentially the chronicle of my 20th year as I selected these and I am pleased to have them together in a single post for easy reference.

Here's to my first full year of blogging and (am I allowed to do this?) many more to come.

I come up with a lot of really random ideas, not to mention frequent transient obsessions with particular trains of thought, and a lot more of these have made it into blogpost form than probably deserved to . . . However, for various reasons I have a particular liking for each of the following. They have nothing to do with each other, and very little to do with much of anything else, but . . . Fine. I'll stop talking now.

--1:11 am, October 13th Long Live the South! - After watching Birth of a Nation with the SC I had a sudden need to return to my room and say something in defense of my idyllic, nostalgia-induced fantasies about the good old days in sleepy Southern towns, immortalized as they are by America's greatest writers. Or maybe I just wanted to list a bunch of books and authors I enjoy reading. That could be it, too.

--4:29 pm, December 3rd Why Do the White Gulls Call? - Homework piling up and threatening to bury me forever . . . Sick as a dog and ready to roll over and play dead . . . Christmas break and the accompanying 3,000-mile trip to Guatemala looming large ahead of me . . . And I still found time to write something about a fantastic song that had just been released. Before very many months had gone by, this song had won itself an Academy Award and helped make movie history . . .

--3:14 am, January 18th Williams on Church, Gandalf on New Age, and Wheeler on Crack - This post sprang from my frustration over a heated discussion with Uncle Doug and a few other people who had succeeded in utterly missing the point I make in the above post. I was quite bothered. Also contained herein is the infamous tale of the navigator and the red light district.

--10:30 pm, February 16th Wheeler, "With Post" - I still hate the title of this post . . . it's every bit as weird here as when Dr. Watson said something like it in class. Nevertheless, herein is everything I learned about Alfred, Lord Tennyson in preparation for my English Lit II presentation . . . and then some.

--4:45 pm, March 3rd Playing the Fool - Oh, yeah. That most upsetting circumstance: playing Lear's Fool with a goofy felt dunce cap that had a sleigh bell on the tip, and using that horribly bastardized version of King Lear besides. I forced myself to have fun, but deep down inside I was filled with hatred and self-loathing. Still, I just knew I'd laugh later . . .

--3:24 pm, March 28th "When Great Minds Collide," or "Ker-splat!" - That excessively random bout of wordplay I had with Wilson over IM which amused me so much that I eventually posted it when I was short on genuine content.

--2:21 pm, March 31st SC Literary Frankenstein Monsters - Ahhh . . . This post, although I made it on the main blog, is dear to my heart. It represents a night of extreme fun delving into the dusty corners of memory (my own and others') for every possible literary character I could dredge up to slap onto an SC member or fringer in an example of ruthless stereotyping. Or something.

--4:15 pm, April 13th The Birds and the Bees - Ah, LeTourneau in the Spring . . . 'Nuff said.

--2:09 am, May 7th Missing - I have no idea why I like this post so much. It's just one of those random inducers of nostalgia, I guess.

--2:27 am, July 1st "The horror! The horror!" - Few things are as satisfying to write as parody is, and although this post took an inordinate amount of time and effort to complete, I am dreadfully fond of it. Wilson as Kurtz . . . Somehow, it just works!

--4:32 pm, July 23rd Vaecordia Confiteor - They say that confession is good for the soul . . . or maybe that it is the first step to curing your problems . . . or . . . I don't know what. "They" are largely idiots, anyway. I just had a fantastic time talking about what a sick Star Wars fanatic I am/was.

The good times I've had over the course of the past year have been numerous indeed . . . far too numerous to count, catalogue, or otherwise record. Some things just stand out, though, and for me the following 10 days in particular fit that bill.

--8:27 pm, November 4th The Day of Caffeine - There's nothing quite like how I felt throughout this day. I still remember the state that I was in when I wrote this post after having been wide awake for about 36 straight hours (no cat naps, even) thanks entirely to my good friends, sugar and caffeine.

--1:25 pm, January 23rd The Shadow Council Players, entering stage left . . . - The beginning of a high-caliber dramatic legacy that is still moving forward today, nine months later. This post and all of its sequels make me very happy (just by default).

--6:22 pm, February 23rd The Sequel That Never Should Have Happened - It was just another one of those days, I guess.

--10:24 pm, March 1st Today is the first day of the rest of your major. - And speaking of one of those days, this was my average M-W-F throughout Spring semester. It had its ups and downs (or should I say, "Its Watsons and Batts"?) but the net result was usually at least something amusing to write about and remember.

--2:58 pm, March 30th Please tell me this is a dream, Part II - Blech! You smell that? It's the fragrant scent of another memory that seems a good deal funnier in hindsight than it did at the time. These would be my experiences playing Puck and . . . uhhh . . . Thisby.

--11:59 pm, April 2nd Wheeler's Conference Epic - My excessively lengthy chronicle of the 7th Annual C. S. Lewis and the Inklings Conference.

--5:40 pm, April 26th Day of Caffeine III: Revenge of the Hooplah - As you can see, after the initial success of the Day of Caffeine, and a reasonably large box office for the sequel, the series' owners decided to whore out the franchise to knock-off-writing hacks. Orrr maybe I just stayed up too late . . . again.

--11:59 pm, May 21st It's "The Jared Show!" - Summer Film Class with Dr. Watson was so . . . much . . . fun!!!

--4:43 pm, July 26th Verily y'all missed a goodly sport . . . - Yay! A visit from The Gallagher and The Bard in the dead of summer! I test the waters of dramatic criticism.

--11:59 pm, August 6th Anna and the King and I and Anna - What happens when the Far East meets East Texas and they collaborate to spawn a bastard musical child? Fun and entertainment for me, Anna, and Dr. Watson, that's what.

--12:14 pm, August 31st The Big Summer Movie Project - This is the equivalent of a short "What I Did This Summer" essay . . . sorta. Pretty self-explanatory, really.

Six of the following posts were written as homework assignments (no, I didn't turn them in exactly as they appear here), and four of them were written "for fun." And, (surprise, surprise), I had fun with them all, but I prefer the ones that I didn't actually have to write. Anyway, of all my posts these are the few that I am most likely to return to over and over to . . . uhhh . . . remember what I actually think about various things.

--5:55 am, January 7th Paradise Lost: An Insomniac's Perspective - I guess this was the first time that I was officially not allowed to get to sleep (and I tried for nearly two hours) until I had posted my thoughts on something I read. My mom was mad because I was still awake when she got up, but I had a great time . . .

--8:15 pm, February 8th The Twilight Zone - After wrestling with Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury for the better part of a week, I managed to come fully to terms with its style and message. Somehow that just made the pay-off better in the end. Good stuff. I loved it.

--1:34 am, February 23rd Lord Tennyson & The Looney Female Obsession - If it has "obsession" in the title, it was probably written fairly late on the night before an English Lit journal portfolio was due. I'm still rather fond of my interpretation of "The Lady of Shalott."

--2:07 am, April 20th Algernon Charles Swinburne & The Pagan Obsession - "Hymn to Proserpine" is definitely one of my favorite poems. Once you get the meter down, it is rich, high-quality reading indeed . . . the devil's food cake of poetry.

--11:59 pm, April 27th Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon & The War Obsession - I really liked the contrast between these poets and their work, and especially what it ultimately communicates about the generation that fought World War I. Mankind in general, and literature in particular, just wasn't the same after this.

--4:15 am, April 28th Edward Morgan Forster & The "Hook-Up" Obsession - Aside from the fact that "A Passage to India" is one of the best movies I've seen this year, thinking through Forster stuff helped me nail another personal philosophical plank to the raft on which I sail the sea of . . . Awww, nevermind.

--6:45 pm, May 22nd Schindler, Goeth, and Stern: Individual vs. Community in Schindler's List - Another one of the best movies I've seen this year. I know, I know . . . I can't believe I'd never seen it either. But I made up for that by watching it four times in two weeks and writing a paper on it.

--1:48 pm, May 24th The "Milk" of Orson Welles: Citizen Kane As Shakespearean Tragedy - I had a really great time with my Film journals this summer . . .

--5:03 am, May 24th A Slipshod, Slapdash Freudian Analysis of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo - . . . these two in particular came to me in flashes of inspiration and just flowed into print.

--5:35 pm, June 8th Jared's Salute to Saki - No, not the Japanese rice wine . . . the British short story author. And don't you give me that disappointed look, either. Trust me, this guy is way better than alcohol.

--11:59 pm, June 24th The Case for the Defense: Harry Potter as Wholesome, Valuable Christian Fantasy - This post took a long time, but I was generally pleased with the result. For quite awhile I had really needed to think through my opinion on the subject coherently and get it down in some semblance of order. Now I no longer feel obligated to justify myself to anyone on this subject . . . on the contrary, it has become their responsibility to justify themselves to me if they disagree. I hold the high ground.

And that's about the size of it. Say, guess what! I didn't actually plan this (really), but it turns out that I'm putting the finishing touches on this post at almost exactly the same time (down to the minute) that very first post went up. How 'bout that?

Late night blogposting is one of those things that just isn't going to change.

Posted by Jared at September 24, 2004 02:19 AM | TrackBack