Hello, World

I started a personal blog way back in the dark ages of 2006, at the suggestion of a co-worker who thought it would be interesting to keep a log of my year in Edinburgh. And so I did—I was diligent, I updated fairly frequently, and I posted some rough homemade videos that are best forgotten. Basically, I blogged because I wanted to have a record of my time abroad, but also because I figured the only people reading it would be a few friends and my mother.

After grad school, the blogging flagged, largely because I was working, and as we were all warned, blogging about work is never a good idea. Unless, of course, it’s a company-approved blog and one is saying nice, sanctioned things about said company. Thus, when I mentioned work, I tried to keep it vague and positive—good for intern job security, bad for storytelling. The rest of my life suffered from “Oh hey, I’m home” syndrome—when one is a permanent tourist, everything is compelling and fascinating, but when one returns to familiarity, it’s difficult to find anything worth mentioning, even to the limited audience of one’s friends and mother.

Even once I started law school, the blogging went in fits and starts. I gave fleeting thought to blogging 1L, but it’s been done (see, e.g., Scott Turow, One L). Then there were the continuing warnings about maintaining one’s online presence—do you really want potential employers to Google your name and find, oh, the Feb Club blog (see, e.g., http://abovethelaw.com/2011/02/do-you-really-need-confederate-flag-decor-at-your-law-school-party)? Or, for instance, that Con Law is a confusing slog you wished you could avoid, or that you still aren’t sure how the Rule Against Perpetuities works?

In short, I posted six times last year: Going back to Europe, annoying Justice Scalia with my inability to turn to the correct signing page, trying to compress Con Law to a single sheet of paper, running with Vibrams, seeing a poor schmuck hit an unmarked police car, and doing a cite check without the benefit of having access to the law library (a situation that, thankfully, has gotten much easier since VJIL took our cite checks to the server. Love it). For all practical purposes, the blogging of 2006 had been reduced to posting weird articles on Facebook.

Not too long ago, my friend Laura began a new blog (About books! With regular updates and everything! Read it here: http://www.whatbookshouldireadtoday.com), also using Blogger. I looked over at her screen this morning and noticed she had pulled up Blogger’s Stats page, which has been much expanded since the last time I used it. Curious, I opened up this blog’s stats to see what, if anything, had been happening in my absence.

I had twelve page views on March 1.

Twenty-two on February 28.

Someone had visited from Poland last month.

In short, I’m shocked. I’m fairly sure that most of these hits were by accident, but just in case, to the seventeen people in the Netherlands who looked at my blog last week, hello from Virginia.

I still have no idea who you are or how you stumbled onto me, but that’s cool.