What is This Blog?

Why did I decide to start a blog?

As this post’s picture is intended to suggest, writing has been a central part of my life and something I have made a priority throughout my time in college. I first realized that I was good at, and genuinely enjoyed, writing during my first year of college at William & Mary, and after transferring wanted to continue to ensure that that was maintained. I decided to join The Villanovan, Villanova’s student newspaper, a decision I did not know at the time would be among the best I’ve ever made.

After writing a few articles, I was informed that the position for Opinion Section editor, the section I had been writing under at the time, would be opening. I don’t exactly remember why I applied, but I vaguely remember it having something to do with psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson’s idea that the more responsibility you take on in your life, the more meaningful your life would be. I cannot begin to say how true I have found this to be, and it has led me to some of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had, increased confidence and competence, and importantly to some of the closest friends I’ve ever been blessed with. I could not be more thankful I made that decision.

I ended up getting the position, and after a year (and the first few months of a global pandemic) it was decided that I’d evidently done a good enough job to run the thing, along with one of the paper’s news editors. Co-Editor-in-Chief was not a position I thought I would hold when I came to Villanova. I had transferred into the business school majoring in Economics, and at the time was still confused enough to have thought that maybe an accounting major was what I needed in my life. For some reason, though, writing always stuck with me, and I found myself in the under-qualified shoes running a newspaper knowing next to nothing about journalism. I still don’t know if my promotion was the right decision, but I maintain a strict position against looking gift horses in the mouth. Regardless, the newfound responsibility gave me opportunities I couldn’t have dreamed of before.

Reflecting on this time as a rapidly aging college senior is, as many of us old folks say, bittersweet. Graduation is approaching at breakneck speed, and despite the fact that I get to spend time with many of these people still, the fact that I no longer hold a real position, that my former co-editor (e.g., best friend) is abroad, and that graduation very likely means seeing all of these people less have still made things feel … different.

I have nonetheless found that getting to write has been one primary thing thing that has allowed me to feel somewhat in control of my life, even though my penchant for writing about Villanova-unrelated topics causes great irritation to a current EIC and the paper’s faculty advisor (love you both).

Ultimately, as the ticking time bomb that is my life winds down to May 14th, the one constant I know I want to maintain is writing. The long run view of my life has always contained at least one book, and the more I think about things the more I think I ultimately feel called to be an academic. Of course, this requires graduate school, and that is a process that takes more time than I currently have, so for the time being I will need to work a “real job,” whatever that is supposed to mean. During this time, I imagine that this blog will become a very important piece of my life, and perhaps I will maintain it as such even beyond. For now though, I just need a place to expound upon things in more than the 280 characters Twitter allows me.

Why THIS blog?

The Line, as the quote on the home page suggests, is a reference to a quote from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a political prisoner under the Soviet government in Siberia. This probably seems a bit strange given the content I’ve uploaded to this page so far, and admittedly the content I am currently posting has strayed a bit from where I initially had intended it to go when I first dreamed this idea up late last year.

My business education, and the intense disdain I have developed towards it, led me to a search for academic meaning elsewhere. I was blessed enough to have discovered the Villanova Humanities Department. A lovely department filled with lovely people, paintings, and ideas, the Humanities department reminded me that school can actually be fun, exciting, and thought provoking, rather than soul crushing, mundane, and rage inducing. The reignited love that I had for school carried over into the papers I got to write for the classes I took, and I genuinely decided that I wanted to continue writing like that following the cessation of my Villanova experience.

That, at the beginning, is what this blog was intended to be. I knew of next to no place that would have allowed me to publish writings like that – especially since I had no real intent of continuing to follow APA or other standards that journals would have wanted – so I decided I needed a blog. I thought long and hard of a name that had both philosophical significance to me, and which would also sound like the name of an actual publication, and voila! The Line was born (only in my head, I had no money at the time).

Months passed before I actually decided to finally go through with this, though, and what I wanted, or perhaps more accurately needed, out of this blog changed in that span. I will still most certainly use this as an opportunity to complain about the increasingly lengthy list of things that annoy me, but my aforementioned Co-Editor and best friend suggested that I might also use this as an opportunity to write about how life is going, and I’ve come to realize that that’s a good idea. I journal, but not enough, and this might be a good opportunity to get back into the habit of keeping track of what’s going on. While not as personal as a private journal, a blog might still do me well in having an opportunity to formalize the far-too-many anxious thoughts that bounce around my head on a given day.