A Reintroduction to the Neo Tokyo Times

I wrote an introduction to an older version of this blog before I’d ever written anything for it. I had a link to it on the sidebar for some time. But the introduction as written wasn’t very accurate as this blog quickly evolved into something particular to law school and the meanderings of my self absorption. Anyhow, here’s a new discussion of what this blog is about. It’s a birthday present. Happy Birthday silly-named blog:

This blog is a blawg, and a document of my law school experience.
I didn’t realize how particular and distinct this experience would be from all my others. I didn’t appreciate the significance of my previous comfort environment back in San Diego. There are parts of me here in New York that I didn’t believe existed. Most of them are fear, uncertainty and inability. But some of them are more welcomed, like reason and rigor and a capacity for certain kinds of hard work I thought were unattainable by me.

This blog is a communication tool for those with whom I can’t speak regularly enough.
I’m not bad at sending an email once in a while to people with whom I haven’t spoken in a while. But I’m not perfect. And there are people in my life who aren’t so much in my life. And this is at least a unidirectional mechanism for me to speak with them.

The comment feature is a welcomed and useful device for multi-directional communication, but I still dominate the tone and topics, so that element of their utility is limited. Not that I don’t love getting comments. I tattoo each and everyone of them onto my chest.

This blog is a way to record my thoughts before I forget them, or otherwise fail to express them into the world around me.
I tend not to understand something until I attempt to communicate it. If I find that it’s not communicable, often I abandon the thought as undeserving or untenable. But I also tend to brush over and forget about things if I don’t communicate them. I have an idea in passing, which passes, if it’s not given some existence outside of my head.

I suppose that’s why I sometimes write trivial and mundane things here, which no one would find interesting. I put them here so I won’t forget them. If they’re not embarrassing or otherwise too private, they’ll go up here. Perhaps they’d be better placed in a diary. But I don’t keep a diary. If I have something to write, which is unacceptable for this space, I tend to write it as a blog post, and then either delete it or save it. I make that decision usually after I sober up. I’m mostly kidding. I very rarely post after an evening out with drinking. But I usually have a pretty strong grasp of right and wrong when inebriated. Not that I don’t still get in some trouble now and again. It’s just that I get more courage when drinking, courage sometimes to do the wrong thing.

This blog is a forum for publishing my occasional and lackluster creative endeavors.
I used to be funny and entertaining. I want to maintain a piece of that for the future. This blog is also an opportunity to refine my capacity for false modesty.

This blog is a regular exercise in writing, discipline, and expression of a persona outside of only my self.

This blog is a tool for introspection.
I think The Scoplaw explained it pretty well: “Creating an entry (of almost any kind) usually means looking over the past 24 hours of my life and reflecting on what I did and why.”

I think this is very true. The unexamined life is not worth living, right? At the end of a busy day, without a completed post to claim, I’ll look back on the day and wonder what there was to write about. I’ll take a moment to discover among the hustle and bustle some meaning and import in the goings on of my life. It gives me a moment to think critically about what it is I’m doing, and where I’m going, and why and if and how I should continue.

This blog is a tremendous waste of time.
I fool around with it a lot. I look at it, read back posts, check reader statistics. I donated to HaloScan a month or so ago, meaning they email me the content of whatever comments are posted, so that decreased somewhat the amount of time I spent logging onto my own blog, but I still waste away with it.

This blog is fun to me.
I like it. I’m going to keep it for a while.