Being the child of a teacher, and a long-time student, I have never yet shaken a feeling that September marks the turning of the year. Not January, not my birthday, nor any of the old holy days. To mark the turning, this year, I’m beginning this blog. My previous blog has now been deleted. It was a strange exercise: completely private in its way, because I never shared my username or URL with anyone, but the possibility of its becoming public ensured that I would do my best to make the entries coherent and relatively polished. At least that was the theory. The illusion of privacy was comforting, on the one hand, allowing me almost as much freedom as I have in my personal journals (those handwritten notebooks I’ve been keeping since I was thirteen or so: twenty of them now, at least, all stuffed in my filing cabinet). On the other hand, I found myself constrained by it: I could not use my blog ID to post anything more public without worrying that I would attract traffic to my blog and wreck its precious solitude. So: apparently the world grows smaller every day, or I grow bigger within it, […]