happy birthday to blog

Happy birthday to blog, Happy Birthday to blog, Happy Birthdaaaaaaay to Blaaaaaa-ooooooggg…

That’s right. Three years ago, my wee blog emerged, awkward and ungrammatical, into the wide world of Blogger. Actually, that would be 3 years ago yesterday (I was so busy celebrating that true to form, I forgot to pop in and wish it a happy birthday). Things have been lonely and slow in blogland for the past couple weeks — it seems like either there’s nothing going on, or too much to say, and either way it’s a bit tough to post. I’m hoping to write more this week and next, but for now, here’s a blog retrospective:

3 years ago: Between semesters at the University of Buenos Aires, my first solo trip ever included highlights like the fake Tren a las Nubes through the mountains in northern Argentina, almost missing my train in Bolivia, the spectacular views (and winds) of the Patagonia, and the hike that ensured I will never again be able to so much as look at granola.

2.5 years ago, July: J and I visited a bunch of Incan ruins, spent the night on an island in Lake Titicaca, saw the overrated (and now sadly earthquake-devastated) nature reserve/fish oil factories at Pisco, and made our first Peruvian enemy.

2.5 years ago, August: I got a taste of the melodrama that is Brazilian politics, and swore never to return to Brasilia.

2 years ago: I was halfway through an internship with Creative Commons in San Francisco during J-term of my senior year at Middlebury.

16 months ago, September: I took my first bush flight to a red dirt runway in Gurue (Mozambique), tried to master the art of getting food in less than 3 hours when ordering from a restaurant menu in Milange, and tore my hair out at the pointlessly convoluted local bureaucracy.

1 year ago, December/January: I was still processing Mozambique, amusing my friends in Cambridge with questions like “is it safe to carry a laptop on the Harvard campus?” (Answer: would anyone actually want to steal your wheezing 5-year-old laptop?), and loving the Berkman Center and Cyberlaw class.

11 months ago: I was seeing another side of Rio, annoyed about the Middlebury history department’s ban of Wikipedia, and trying to find a place to live.

I’ll stop going by months. This is me in Rio:

Reveling in the unabashed geekery of the International Free Software Forum (actually, that was in Porto Alegre)

Not quite getting Brazilian online social networking

Crossing an invisible line into Brazilianness (Brazilianity? Brazilianism?)

Reflecting on violence, muggings, gunfights, police corruption, and whether I’d rather live in a favela or go to a midwestern mall

It’s both interesting and strange to read over my old posts. Some things I still agree with, some things I can’t believe I ever wrote. Some posts were so embarrassingly naive that I had to take them down (sorry — but I never claimed that this was a faithful historical record). I don’t know if the blog has improved exactly, but it’s definitely evolved. I’ve changed, too, I guess. Hopefully for the better.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. If the blog weren’t so busy stuffing its virtual face with the delicious virtual cupcakes I bought to assuage my feelings of virtual birthday-forgetting guilt, it would thank you for putting up with my occasionally coherent ramblings for the past three years. But since in reality the blog is just as awkward as it was when it was born, I’m doing the doting parent thing and writing its thank-you notes myself. Thanks to everyone for all the the nice comments, the support, and for caring enough to stay in touch. Thanks for the letters and emails and care packages (even the ones that disappeared in the black holes of the Brazilian or Argentine postal systems), for the advice and encouragement, for making me laugh and for sticking with me through what have definitely been the strangest and best years of my life so far. It’s been great having you all along for the ride.

a cattle’s eye view of the iowa caucus

Iowa has more pigs than people. A lot more, actually. I don’t know how many exactly we have of either, although I did hear once that the ratio is 5 to 1 in favor of the pigs. Which is part of the reason that I think the Iowa caucuses are silly. Candidates crisscross the state in the snow eating corndogs and trumpeting farm-state causes for months in advance; our phones ring off the hook with pre-recorded surveys (Press 6 for Ron Paul), pre-recorded candidate pitches (Hi, this is Bill Clinton), and unfortunately real people lecturing us on abortion; we mess the electoral calendar up because our state constitution demands we be FIRST IN THE NATION; and then it builds to a fever pitch and it’s all anyone can talk about and Iowa is mentioned a zillion times a day in the press and my own small town gets a front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal. After all that… only about 300,000 people show up to vote, or I guess closer to 350,000 this time around which I think broke some records. But let’s be clear: that’s not a whole lot of voters, even in a not-very-populous state (Iowa has about 3 million people and about 1.8 million registered voters.) Based on my quick and imprecise mental calculations, that means we’re looking at a ratio of pigs to caucus-goers of about 50 to 1.

But anyway. I’m going to stop now, because I don’t want to rain on Iowa’s only media parade. And because, honestly, there’s something sort of charming about the weird, anachronistic proceedings of caucus night. I say this as someone who just got back from my first caucus ever and who is currently watching as the Iowa results are plastered all over the news. It’s interesting… the most participatory form of democracy I’ve ever experienced, although not necessarily the most democratic. Like a throwback to the good old days, by which I mean the 1800s and town hall meetings and supremely archaic procedural rules that no one, including the caucus chairs, actually understands.

In case you’re interested, I took some notes. Kind of like liveblogging, only with a really long time delay, so I guess not really. Also probably not a very good overview of caucus rules — if you want that, the Wikipedia entry is decent.