Preface
Welcome to my blog! I’ll eschew a formal bio for now; I might update this page and post one if (by some miracle) it becomes widely read outside of my immediate circle of friends and family. In this preface, I want to discuss why I created a blog and what I’ll be writing about. Before I begin, I want to thank you for visiting my site. In my best “flight attendant after arrival” voice, I know you have a lot of choices about where to spend your time online, and I’m grateful that you decided to visit my blog.
Why did I start a blog? Simply put, I wanted to have a space to chronicle my experiences and voice my opinions. But why do my experiences and my opinions merit writing about? If someone were to ask me that question, I’d reply, “they don’t.” Sure, no one has lived through the same set of events I have, but that follows from multiplying small probabilities and doesn’t imply at all that I’m special. If nothing sets the content I write apart, why would anyone want to read it? I’ve wanted to create a blog for many years, but I didn’t, because I couldn’t answer this question (and I could procrastinate). In June 2022, I thought of a workaround to the question. We live in an era of extensive, often excessive self-promotion. Content from media personalities and influencers populates our web search results and social media feeds, but much of it isn’t noteworthy or special. Tik-Tok stars and political keyboard warriors routinely become immensely popular with milquetoast video clips and ill-informed “hot takes”. I convinced myself that I didn’t need to be special, and so I succumbed to self-promotion and began writing. I insisted on a blog because I loathe cult-like followings, and I think that my style will be too civil for Twitter, too eloquent for Facebook, too verbose for Instagram, and too formal for most other social media. I started by browsing for templates on WordPress, but I didn’t find anything that suited my vision for the site. I dusted off my (mediocre) web programming skills from my mental toolbox and got to work.
What inspired me to start this? The first blog-like content I wrote was a summary of my family’s vacation to Europe in the summer of 2014. Each evening, I’d describe the places we visited, and as a young weather nerd, I’d record the day’s weather in great detail (if you ever need to know what the weather was like in London in July 2014, you know whom to ask). I’ve also posted some short stories collected during runs and hikes on Strava, a social media platform for athletes; the mostly positive reception I received piqued my curiosity about starting a site for my content. I regularly read the work of many of the New York Times’ opinion columnists; despite their ideological differences, Margaret Renkl and Ross Douthat are two of my favorites. Their creative and thought-provoking columns made me wonder if I could pull something vaguely similar. Most importantly, the success of some of my friends' blogs persuaded me to start my own. Two of my favorites are Jacob Lehmann Duke’s blog In Search of America, narrating his epic hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, and Maya Wilson’s blog Hey it’s Maya, discussing her relationship with food and favorite recipes. They’re both fantastic writers and I highly recommend reading their work when you get a chance!
What will I write about? A substantial portion of the posts will be about food. These posts might include restaurant reviews, recipes, and food-related anecdotes. I enjoy cooking, and I love to try new food (as long as it isn’t too spicy). Many of my other posts will be about nature, including experiences while running, hiking and backpacking, as well as climate science. More often than not, you’ll find me somewhere in the mountains on the weekends! I might also dabble in sports, satire, and miscellaneous data-driven writing if I have an idea I can expand into an article. I’m a fairly political person, but it’s increasingly risky to write about political things (even in private, civil spaces). I might write political opinion posts, but I’ll tread lightly and eloquently. Am I well-qualified to write about any of these things? Not particularly. But I’ll give it my best shot and keep the spotlight away from myself.
How often will I post? I don’t want to unleash a geyser of effort in the first few weeks and subsequently leave this site parched and abandoned for years. I’m aiming to post once or twice a month for much of the remainder of my life. Idealistic? Yes. Achievable? We’ll see! I hope that the relaxed schedule allows me enough time to balance writing with all my other commitments and responsibilities. I’ll try to keep myself accountable to one post per month at the bare minimum.
What am I afraid of? Failure, rejection, and roller coasters (or other sudden drop-inducing phenomena like air turbulence) comprise my top three life fears. On this blog, my primary self-doubts are about the sustainability of this site, my writing style, and the blog’s name. Like I discussed earlier, I fear skipping a post one month, procrastinating it to the next month, then the next, until the blog withers away, like the Colorado River. I also worry about my style of writing failing to capture my ideas or mesh with my content. I obsess over good word choice, verb activation, and the Oxford comma (all of which I love), as well as pronoun dropping (which I hate). I like to think my attention to style and grammar benefits my writing, but I often think my final products end up too formulaic and dry. I hope my perception of my writing quality improves over time. On a side note, please comment if you find any errors or ambiguities in any of my posts (and feel free to comment for any reason; I appreciate any time you spend reading and responding).
Finally, I’m ambivalent about the name of my blog. I purchased the domain name www.manu-blog.com for a few years, so there’s no changing the name away from “The Manu Blog'' for the foreseeable future. But the name took no creativity to devise and doesn’t hint at anything I write about. Haakon Pihlaja and Cece Muecke proposed the name “The Impenetrable Coconut” while cooking coconut curry and noodles with me in July 2022. I love the name, and I’ll use it if I ever start a separate satire section (though I thought it was a little too informal for the blog as a whole).
That’s all for now; welcome to The Manu Blog, and I hope you enjoy the content!