Redecorating.

So I finally got around to changing the motif around here. I'm not sure this is the way things are going to stay, as I'm not completely satisfied with it, but it is at least a change-- a change that, I think, better reflects where I am now, not where I was three years ago when I opened this Blogger account. I enjoyed the brooding grays and blacks of my previous design, cerebral and stark. But all that is gone now.

Instead of the Chicago skyline, we now have a whimsical painting I found in the Ashmolean during my trip to Oxford. It better captures how I live now; freer, happier, the world opened up before me with the starry sky above. Sure, it is in some ways a return to the sometimes flowery self-indulgence that marked my adolescent blogs years ago. It's perhaps less "grown-up" than my monochrome skyline and simple, streamlined design. And yet, I find a symbolic significance to the playful painting and the muted greens and creams of this blog's newest iteration.

Sometime near the end of my high school career, I made a WordPress account with the intention of keeping a blog there. It had all the right trappings: an brown, intellectual looking template, a catchy URL, etc. And yet I updated it only sporadically. I realized that it was just a slightly more thoughtful variation on my earlier Xanga account-- something I did not wish to repeat. And so it fell out of favor.

Yet I felt like I wanted some sort of online presence, a place to dump my thoughts. For while I didn't really like blogging or the concept behind it-- giving everyone a platform to whine, moan, and wax seemed dangerous to me-- I realized that my strategy of willful ignorance would not, in the long run, benefit me. Thus, because I couldn't beat 'em, I joined 'em. And now we have this Blogger account.

I have changed so much since my first attempts at keeping a blog. I stand on the cusp of a truly scary and truly exciting time of life; graduate school, vocation, marriage. The real world stands at my door. And so in many ways I feel like that little guy on the boat up there, his face to the sky, searching for the transcendent. In fact, for the brief time I kept that WordPress account, I penned a post that used a ship and sea as a metaphor for my life. Trite, to be sure, but once more pertinent as I look to this next chapter of my life.

We'll see how long this design lasts.