HELLO. I’M GREG.

I have decided to start this new blog.

This is not my first blog. My first blog burst onto the scene in late 2001 (some time in October, I think, or perhaps November). For a glorious few months I was not all that far behind the vanguard, and I did a decent job of posting with regularity (even when I didn’t have all that much worthwhile to say). I even used Blogger to create an information page for the students of a history class I taught at the time.

I ran out of steam in 2002 (or 2003?) and let the blog lie fallow. Given that by this time I was teaching high school students instead of university students, I became more sensitive to the potential downsides to expressing your thoughts to the world at large in a searchable, quasi-permanent forum. So I created a new blog and endeavored to keep my identity difficult to learn (I didn’t go as far as to think up a snazzy pseudonym). I’ve kept on top of that blog in fits and starts, and after I stopped teaching schoolchildren I stopped caring if random folks knew who I was. Lately, though (particularly since I went off on vacation in July), I’ve just not been able to get back into the swing.

I feel like I should do something, though. There was a time when I was a decent writer (I am an ABD historian), and writing is a skill you’ve got to use or lose. Also, I have Useful Insight from time to time, and it seems that I should share that with my fellow humans. Also, I have friends in several time zones whom I rarely see, and a blog is an easy way to give people the sense that they still know you (at least that’s how I feel reading friends’ blogs). There are other reasons, I suppose.

So my options were to revive one of my dead or dying blogs, start a new one, or give up altogether. The advantage to starting a new one is that I can be marginally mysterious, assuming that anyone who doesn’t already know me ever reads this. I can also talk more frankly than I might otherwise about people with whom I deal professionally. Revival lacks these advantages. Giving up has the singular advantage of requiring no effort whatsoever on my part, but means I’d have to come up with other ways of doing the things mentioned in the paragraph immediately above this one.

And that’s a partial account of how it came to be that you are reading this.