Two things a bird posted recalled this to my memory: first, the request for more blog reading; and then the blog-provided map-generator of one’s past travel destinations. When I was abroad in Santiago de Chile, I met another study abroad student who took his dissatisfaction with the study abroad experience in hand, dropped out of his program, and found work cutting trail in the Patagonian wilds. I know it sounds like a fairy tale, but I’m serious; some people just have a gift for living good stories.

We’ve done a lot of meta-blogging -- blogging about blogs -- on this site. We’ve blogged about reading blogs; we’ve blogged about writing (or not writing) blogs; we’ve taken lots of different angles on attempted classifications and categorizations of the blog; we’ve talked about the weirdnesses particular to a class blog where credit and grades are involved -- the increased potential for perfectionism, anxiety, self-consciousness, and how these very writer-blocking neuroses are at least in some measure related to the fact that we all have access to a list that attaches names and faces to our blog aliases.

In this post, I want to deal with this class blog in particular, and to do so in a personal and non-theoretical way.