Current mood:

tired

...well, blast it, I'm going to start this thing for real now...
I'm going to start by telling you exactly who's to blame for this thing. I'll go in chronological order.

First, there was USENET. And rec.music.christian in particular. I had no clue that I could do anything that even vaguely resembled quality writing until r.m.c. If you want to be entertained, you can do a Google search for me on that and other groups - try rec.sport.soccer for funsies as well, although I refuse to go back there until Ariel returns...

Second, there was bev. I feel very privileged that she will, on occasion, actually allow me to call her that instead of Wednesday; you might try google-searching Wednesday on USENET too, she's more prolific than I am. She writes like nobody's business, and her peak was sometime around 1997, although some things pop into my box even now that utterly blow my mind. When I was trying to figure out what I believed and why, her writings drove the debate in my head. (Trust me, bev, that was a good thing.)

Third, there was Kevin Cabral (who I'm trying to find a web page on; gad, doesn't anybody have home pages anymore? here, he got quoted on seattle.internet.com once on the subject of Rivals.com, whose demise I know way too much about). Kevin set up a little web site sometime around '97 or '98 called CrewFan, for fans of some little soccer team in central Ohio, and almost immediately (thanx to the crap I'd written on rec.sport.soccer) he started chasing after me to write for his little thing. I resisted him for a spell, then got pissed off at something (I think it was the stupid format of the MLS All-Star Game, or something like that) and wrote. And wrote. And wrote some more. And then finally took over the thing.

(And, by the way, words ought to be said here about keeno guys like Matt Bernhardt, Brian Guilfoos, Mike Cornell, and Chris Gallutia - guys who helped me with that endeavor when it was going great-guns. And then also about Lee Smith, who took the thing over when the Rivals thing went south, and then started organizing the evolution of the site to MatchNight, the best damn Yank soccer site on the planet, once I started going south - figuratively and literally. I'm glad a version of the thing that Kevin started back in the day is still going and evolving...and Lee (who has a business of his own to run besides) deserves praise to the nines for all he's done, very little besides the joy of that little labor of love...)

And fourth, there is a little dorm on this marvelous college campus where I work called Grace Hall. In that dorm there are students in a program called the Georgia Academy of Mathematics, Engineering, and Science, and I am insanely jealous of those students because I wanted something like that when I was a junior in high school and unable to take trig because I was the only one - junior OR senior - who signed up. Somewhere in that jealousy, I figured out that I hadn't finished growing up yet and I needed some friends who were good and geeky like me, who cares that they were on occasion my students and stuff. It's been strange, and at the same time incredibly gratifying - both on the personal level and on the academic level, in the ways that I have become something of a mentor to a few of 'em.

And a good many of them write journals (albeit on a rather sucky little site with way too many pop-ups - no, i'm NOT biased, honest, but this site rawks) and have let me in on them. And the journals of two students who were in the first trig-based physics class I taught here - Jesse and Nancy (as well as the students themselves; both are utterly remarkable people in their own right) - had enough of an impact on my thought process to make me think "you know, I've always written, and my life has always come into everything I've written, but I've never written much about myself." (Well, in retrospect, I have on USENET, but even then it's been in the context of Christian music and the r.m.c community, so.) So it's time to give this a go.

That's why I'm doing this again, this time - I think - for real.