I usually take my time adopting the latest craze/fad/gadget/movie. I like to let the fuss die down and see if it’s really something interesting or just another silly thing to fill people’s nanosecond attention spans. So it is with blogging. The fuss has died down, and it’s clear that this format has the potential to be wildly useful to me.

I’ve actually been wanting to start one for some time now, and I’ve got all kinds of great excuses why I’m just now doing so. I won’t bore anyone with those, but I will say that I’m excited because I’ve been trying to establish a presence on the web for years, but never have gone all the way and fully developed my personal website. It’s sad, really, considering I know how to build websites from scratch, and that I’ve owned a domain name and have been paying for hosting for years.

But honestly, the reason it has taken me so long is because I feel like I’m only now coming to a point in my abilities where I could design something that I would feel good about calling my own. I’ve taken some interesting side paths to get to where I am now (personal trainer, chef, tile setter, painter, etc).

I’ve known how to build websites for a few years, and have made a couple recently that I’m actually proud of. But somehow I always stopped short of finishing my personal site. A lot of this had to do with the fact that a static site always seemed so, well, static. After all that work, my website becomes out of date in about 2 weeks. I knew I’d just end up letting it stagnate for too long, because the of the time-consuming, cumbersome process of building new pages every time I want to put something new up.

Enter the blog. Now I get to forgo most of those nifty design skills I’ve spent so long acquiring, and do it the easy way! Just kidding, I’ll get around to jazzing up the design flavor around here real soon. Honest. But seriously, the ease with which I can jump in and tell a story about the photos I took, or the meal I cooked, or the mountain I climbed is quite frankly exhilarating. Call me a dork for being exhilarated by blogging, I don’t care. Or would that make me a geek? I always get those two mixed up. I wear either with equal pride.

It’s not the process of blogging that excites me so much, it’s the knowledge that this format will encourage me to write, which is something I feel very much that I should be doing. I like it. I feel I do it well. I know that by writing about them and sharing them, I can gain more from my experiences through the process of self-reflection. I can also see that this thing will gain its own momentum and spur me to do things that I love and to see them more clearly as I document and explain them.

Hopefully it will be entertaining for people other than me…but if not, hey. In the words of Tony Soprano, “Whaddya gonna do?”