An Introduction (of sorts)

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“It is myself that I portray.”

-Montaigne

I used to blog.

During college, I’d post my blogs on Myspace. Some dealt with whatever bugged me at the time (I recall many of these lambasting one of my classmates, who wore nonprescription, black-rimmed glasses and constantly name-dropped obscure Russian authors, even when they had nothing to do with our discussion), while others reviewed music albums and novels. Some were analyses of movies I had seen recently (the most obscure films I could find—all of them foreign, most in black and white), and some were ramblings I labeled as art.

I guess the black-rimmed glasses kid and I shared more than I wanted to admit.

However, when Myspace faded away, my spirit for writing blogs faded with it. Facebook’s notes were clunky at best, and with student teaching just around the corner, my time for writing anything other than lesson plans was nonexistent. I thought my free time would return once I got an actual job, that this frantic workload was only temporary.

What the hell was I thinking?

My first year of teaching provided little time for anything outside of school. During the day, I taught three classes, and at night, I helped with theatre, coached speech team, and even appeared onstage. Some nights, I got home around eleven, fell into bed, and woke up early the next morning to grade, surviving on two cases of Diet Coke a week (a habit that persists to this day).

That first year was a haze. Everything that had pushed me into English fell by the wayside. I read maybe three books for pleasure that year; my writing came to a crashing halt; and I didn’t see a single movie in theaters. My life was teaching, and sadly, I was still figuring out what the hell that word meant.

After my first year, though, my free time slowly returned, and I picked back up some of my favorite hobbies. The number of books I read increased. I started writing again. And I found myself in theaters more and more.

Sadly, though, some hobbies remained college pastimes.

Before today, the last blog I wrote was about deleting my Myspace and Facebook accounts as I readied myself for student teaching. The date on that blog is August 15^th, 2007, the day after NIU’s student teaching orientation. A number of noted professionals in the teaching community addressed this new thing called “social networking.” In so many words, they said it would get us fired, get us sued, and land us in jail.

Sweating bullets, we all hit delete and smashed our modems.

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Introductions are hard. I usually don’t write them until the end, and I urge my students to do the same. I figure once I know more about my paper, once it’s evolved past the point of a preliminary outline, I can effectively introduce it. However, with blogs, it’s different.

How do I introduce myself?

Hi, I’m Tim. I teach high school English and coach speech. I’m 27, married, and enjoy writing fiction.

Awful.

However, with anything more in depth, I run the risk of sounding narcissistic…although, that would be an accurate introduction to who I am, as well.

But not really.

It’s a part of me, yes (and I feel many of you who know me nodding your heads), but not the whole. In other settings, I’m horribly shy. In others, I’ll carry on a conversation after a while. And yet, in others still, I won’t shut up. I suppose this is true of almost everyone, but it’s one feature I obsess over, making it noteworthy to my introduction.

I also love chicken tenders.

Along with teaching and being happily married, I write. After my second year of teaching, I made a promise to write five pages a day, even if it meant a few hours of sleep. For the most part, I kept that promise, and ended up writing a novel I’ve shown all of one person (my wife). I wouldn’t consider submitting it, but it taught me a lot about crafting narrative, lessons that I’ve since included in my creative writing course.

I drink at least three Diet Cokes a day. My colleagues and friends have considered enrolling me in a twelve-step program. I wish I were exaggerating. A student once painted a Diet Coke can for me to hang on my wall, a testament to my addiction.

It still hangs there.

And still, none of these really “introduce me.” They give parts, but I guess that’s really what a blog is supposed to do. Is it a story? A series of essays? Diary entries? Random musings appearing below a rather pretentious title stolen from a book?

The answer: Yes.

However, introducing anything before it is written has never been my strong suit. In short, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to write after this, but I think whatever it is will do a better job introducing me than any introduction I write at the outset.

Whatever I write, though, will differ greatly from the blogs I wrote when I was 22. Only five years have passed, but the kid I was then and the person I am now are quite different, and the content will most likely be much different, as well. Except for when I write about Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à Part, a French film from the 1960s and a great example of the Nouvelle Vague.

I guess I still have some things in common with my college self, after all.

And the kid who wore nonprescription black-rimmed glasses.