If you are stumbling upon this post from a time months or even years into the future, trawling backwards through my oodles and oodles of blog journal posts looking for the point where it all began, then I have three things to say to you:

1. Greetings, future man! Or, uh, woman! Or other!
2. Seriously, you need to get a hobby or something.
3. And finally, here it is: the end of the line. There are no older posts than this.

Okay well technically that last part’s not quite true. From 2008 until some time around 2011ish I kept another blog: Icarus’s Labyrinth. So, dear future-stalker, you still have another 148 or so posts to read. Muahahahaha! Since in your time, the sun is no doubt extinct and your kind are all high-tech cave dwellers with no other source of entertainment apart from reading self-indulgent blog posts, you have been spared a trip into the radioactive killing fields in search of honest work. You’re welcome.

If you’re not from the future . . . <insert sound of crickets chirping> . . . well, this is awkward, isn’t it? I’m afraid there’s no other content here besides this post. See, you were really meant to stumble on this after I’d had a chance to generate some content. It’s like that scene in Ellen’s Energy Adventure at Epcot where she–yeah, you know what? It’s a long story.

So why the switch? Well, since my friend Scott Roberts loathes lists, let’s throw a second one into this post, just to tick him off:

• That other blog was more of a diary of my writing activities. I kept it for my own narcissistic benefit (totally unlike this blog journal) to chart my growth and experiences as a writer. This one is going to be more about having fun, expressing my opinions, meeting people, and having good conversations.
• I eventually plan to build a web site with other content besides this blog journal, and it doesn’t appear to me that Blogger is a useful tool for that, compared to WordPress.
• Erm, I don’t actually have a third bullet point.

Over the last few years, I’ve become much more active in posting on other people’s blogs and forums, and learned that I really enjoy the give and take of ideas and opinions. I think it’d be cool to collect some of those exchanges on my own site.

I’m not going to do the regimented this-topic-on-this-day-of-the-week thing that so many other blogs I visit do. I figure I’ll babble about whatever I want, whenever the mood strikes me. But there are some themes I seem to be especially interested in, so they’ll probably come up a lot. Just for Scott, let’s list them:

• Writing–well sure, I’m still pretty obsessed with writing, so while this isn’t a writing blog per se (French for “that’s what she said”) I’ll still probably bring it up once in a while.
• Reading–especially science fiction, fantasy, and young adult.
• Teaching–that’s the job that pays my bills, and it’s much more than a job to me. As with writing, whether I’m any good or not is for other people to judge, but again, as with writing, I’m passionate about my vocation and it’s never far below the surface.
• That weird cultural territory where being an American and being a Latino intersect for me. I love this country, but I also love my heritage. I want to see more stories out there where the characters’ background and experiences look familiar to me–in fact, I hope to write some of them.
• Gender–I have a real hate-hate relationship with how we try to box people based on what strikes me as a pretty small bit of biology and a much larger pile of cultural baggage. I think sometimes it’s hard to see just how much cultural baggage there is because we’re swimming in it. (As an aside, I don’t recommend swimming in baggage; while you won’t drown, it’s probably not the most efficient way to get around.)
• Math. Yeah, that’s right, I went there. Math is beautiful and interesting, and if you don’t know that, it’s just because you’ve been scared off by the race to level up that our school system puts everyone through, and you haven’t had a chance to see the amazing interrelatedness of mathematics, and to hear about its fascinating history. Yeah, it might come up from time to time. You can deal.
• Disney–The Intellectual Scouts offer a merit badge in Disdaining Disney. I never earned mine. Disney is far from perfect, but at their best they show an astonishing attention to detail in everything from their movies to their service to their architecture to their rides. I’m a very detail-oriented person, and so when I recognize that in someone else–when I can see how much effort someone else has put into the little things, I soak it up.
• Everything else. There are very few things in the world that bore me. Things that go over my head do, but I try to keep the number of things that do that down to a manageable number.

Holy apostrophe this blog journal post has gotten long on me!