Two Slashes

The calendar says February 28, and that can mean only one thing:  the Comment Block experiment has come to an end.

In case you’ve been pulling a Rip Van Winkle, I’ve been following in Justin’s footsteps by trying to provide a “meaningful” (ha!) post each day for a month.  (If you want to read what you missed, you can peruse the contents of the appropriate tag at your leisure.)

It was partially an experiment to see if it was possible for me to come up with daily original content.  While I might have managed to squeak through this shortened month, I don’t think I would be able to continue much longer.  I’ve already exhausted most of my Evernote notebook, and the remaining clips are not likely to be kept much longer.

Top top it off, I’m only partially happy with the results.  While I did manage to keep to the one-post-per-day idea alive, the posts sometimes ended up with timestamps of a few minutes after midnight (and exactly midnight in one case, though all of the posts were well within my confused version of a day ), and some of what I wrote really isn’t as intelligently written as I would have liked it to be.  I suppose it comes with the hectic life of a college student, but I think it would have been better to have given myself the time to get the post worked through to satisfaction rather than have to worry about publishing before midnight, especially considering I put more than two hours of work into some of them.

I also experimented with my writing styles and post formats a bit, trying a few ideas (most of which won’t be seeing the light of day again, I think).  I’ve also developed a few more ideas that might be more worthy (and lead to some more regular posting, too).  I threw out a few project ideas (to more feedback than I was anticipating), brought school and my blogging a little closer together, attempted to expand on my incessant tweeting (which may become a weekly feature, though I haven’t decided yet), and put good use to the review category.

If I were to do this again, I’m definitely going to be making a few small changes.  As I said before, I wasn’t impressed with some of the content I wrote, so that would be the first thing to receive some work.  I would also have to find a reasonable time limit that doesn’t trample all of my schoolwork and other projects in the process to make the posting more manageable than the midnight deadline I’ve been trying to follow for the past month.

Look forward to me trying for a more manageable and predictable post schedule.  I’ve already proved I can find the time, so it’s more or less a matter of finding topics and expanding on them.  Expect a little of everything once I recover from this past month, but in the meantime, I’ll be riding off with The Limousines.

Imagine that.  The month is almost up.  Stay tuned for the wrap-up of the previous month in pseudo-randomness, which will be arriving at some point in the near future.

Many people see their twenties as a turning point for their lives.  They’re just starting to figure out adulthood, but sometimes they’re not quite ready, like the single bunch of green bananas you always end up with at the supermarket.  Others are so ready that they end up looking like this orange by the time they leave their teens.  Either way, there’s plenty to blame for why that piece of fruit looks the way it does, and everyone comes out the tail end the better for themselves.

Posted to 20SB earlier today was a request for topic suggestions for a graduate-level writing assignment, the goal of which is to write twenty pages on life experiences.  I like the prompt, having had a similar (though much shorter requirement) for a rhetoric class I took last year:

If you had to write 20 nonfiction pages as a 20-something, what would you write about? College? Debt? Growing up?  (slightly modified for readability )

To be honest, I don’t know if I have a real answer to that question.  You’ll notice how infrequently the “Personal” category has been used since I first opened it up in December to rant about my issues with the previous holiday season.

It’s not for lack of trying to come up with anything, though, especially since I started this whole “Comment Block” project.  Granted, there are a few differences between writing a (comparatively long) essay to be read by at most a handful of people (let’s add in the point that usually you know these people in real life) and a digestible yet public blog post (potentially read by hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people you’ve never met, and indexed, categorized, and cached a half-dozen times before you even have a second chance to think about what you’ve published).  There’s a happy medium that needs to be found.  Compared to old writings from a previous blog (of which I have only scraps, sorry), I’m a lot less revealing in what I post (and at the same time a bit more boring, I assume).

I know my personal tangent there is a bit unrelated, but considering the discussion on 20SB is limited to members, I figured I’d bring the question out into a more general audience.  What would you write about if you were given this prompt?