Reboot

 When I first arrived in Japan last August I decided to start this travel blog to tell you all about the strange new things I was encountering in my journey.  As you have noticed, the blog hasn’t seen much activity in the last few months.  The thing is, I am no longer a traveler in Japan – I live here.  The strange and incomprehensible things that gave me something to write about when I first arrived are still as strange as they ever were, but now they are familiar.  You can’t write a travel blog about the place you live.

So I need to reboot this blog, give it a new purpose.  I got an idea from a fantasy novel I recently finished.  In the book a girl runs away from home and ends up living in a temple in a foreign city.  The priest agrees to feed, clothe, and educate her if she will commit to joining the temple.  One portion of her education involves her going into the city during the week and selling clams from a cart.  At the end of each week she reports back to the priest three things she learned during the week.   It doesn’t matter what the three things are as long as they were new to her.  Maybe she learned some new gossip around town, maybe she learned where to find the best clams, maybe she learned how to do a cartwheel – if it was something new, the priest was satisfied.

And that’s my idea for the blog.  It doesn’t matter what I write about, as long as it is something I have learned in the past week.  (You should never stop learning, right?)  So what can you expect?  Less posts about Japanese culture or events, but more posts on more general things that currently interest or intrigue me.  Maybe this plan won’t solve my problems, but at least I’ll have one less excuse for neglecting the blog.

I might as well get started right here with this new plan.  And what is the new thing I have learned about?  A little thing called “blog etiquette” (insert snarky comment here).  I (obviously) didn’t give it much thought before; I didn’t realize that such a thing existed, or if I did realize it I never thought it applied to me.  Here is my blog, my own personal journal of a sort, and I just happen to be putting it on the internet for any interested party to view.  But I was reading a different blog the other day and was surprised by a post the author made.  He made a post just to say that his next actual post would be a week late, but he wanted his audience to know that he was still there, still writing for them.  It made me think of the way I’ve treated my audience (whoooops).  I mean, I have a handful of websites on my toolbar that I check for regular updates (mostly webcomics, but a couple of traditional blogs too), and I appreciate the regularity and punctuality of their posts.  And if they aren’t able to make a post, they take the time to let me know that they are still there for me, they are just running a little behind.  I just never thought to apply the same concept to myself as a blogger, but that’s what I am now, eh?

So, for those of you that enjoy reading what I write here, thank you.  For those of you that checked here in the past few months hoping for a new post, thank you, and I’m sorry I left you all in the dark for so long.  I’ll do my best for weekly updates (maybe by Sunday each week?), and if I don’t have new material I’ll try to at least let you know I’m still around and to expect a new post before too long.  Since the topics I’ll be writing about has significantly expanded now, feel free to leave comments of things you want me to write about.  No promises, but maybe your idea will spark my next post.

Double points if you get the reference.