Tap. . . Tap. . . Is This Thing On?

Posted byJonathan Sterne

Greetings, loyal rss aggregators, assorted robots and extremely dedicated readers. After a summer hiatus, this blog awakens refreshed. Sure, blogging is so passé that it’s cast as a quaint, dated practice in Julie and Julia but that won’t stop me.

During the summer’s silence, time pushed me past a few milestones.  I’m not normally given to observing blog anniversaries, but I will indulge this once.

  • This blog is now over 5 years old.
  • I have now lived in Montreal longer than I lived in Pittsburgh.
  • I have completed a full decade of professing.  This September marks the beginning of year 11.
  • As my mom points out, I’m now in my 40th year of life (since one only turns 40 at the end of the 40th year)

All of this would suggest that it’s time for some reflective self-assessment.  And I’m certainly raring to go on that front.  I am nearing completion of a whole bunch of things that will open up the next stage of my life: finishing old writing projects and conceiving of new ones; finishing old music projects and starting some new projects in art and music; carrying out my last year as chair and looking forward to a sabbatical in 2010-11 after which I will return to the ranks of the faculty; and experiencing changes in my body and outlook that appear to coincide with getting a little older.  Oh, and the blog and sterneworks designs are starting to feel a little long in the tooth.

But the next 9 months or so are going to fly by, and the reality that any sustained self-reflection will occur on vacation or sometime next summer.  So in lieu of any deep confessional thinking-out-loud for the moment, I’ve simply changed the subtitle to this blog.  Even though I’m still very American (and in a way, the more I travel the more American I feel), I am also becoming more and more Canadian, and will be applying for citizenship on the day that I am eligible (sometime in early November depending on the actual length of a trip in October).  Though right now it’s an 18-month wait, which means I may get date sometime during my sabbatic year, when I’m not in Canada.

In the meantime, I return to semi-regular writing in this space, and will try to supplement the usual reflections with some discussion of what I did on my summer vacation.  At least the interesting parts.