placard at Sunnyvale’s Baylands Park, pictured below

Last night, as I lay falling asleep, I had this crazy notion that I needed to start blogging again, like, right now, like, at least tomorrow, because if I put it off until Monday, it wouldn’t happen, and my beautiful blog would just keep sitting here, unused, embarrassing me with its aging.

Yes, it’s been since August. You know the feeling when you’ve been meaning to call someone, and the longer you put it off, the more ashamed you feel at how long it’s been, and the less likely you are every day to call, until that person sees you’re in their city on Facebook and THEY call YOU? Or, like, you just stop being friends with them?

Yeah, it’s like that.

So last night I told myself–amid thinking about all the articles I wish I had time to write and all the things I have to say, things which get interminably jotted down in Apple Notes to be revisited in some future never-forever–that I would start blogging again–EVERY DAY, mind you–that my posts could be as short as 100 words but I just had to do it.

To be honest, I feel scared.

portrait of the artist as a 30-year-old in bike shorts

I feel like my voice has changed. Actually, I feel like my entire relationship to this blog has changed. I’ve had a crisis of authority–which is really a crisis of voice–because in writing my dissertation, diving deep into hiphop pedagogy and critical race theory and whiteness theory and working to understand hiphop as a revolutionary culture commodified for bougie white consumers like me–my uptake of the word hiphop for my blog title (let alone my whole professional identity) was starting to feel really sinister. Beyond that, being on the academic job market throughout this past year made me feel like this blog was being surveilled, assessed in a high-stakes way, and if I needed to be experimental or messy or unruly in my writing and my publicly performed identity, this was not the time.

Well, when is the time? This first month post-election has me feeling like YOLO, and since the only thing I’ve been sure of in this short, confusing life of mine has been that I want to write as much as possible, well, here I am. I humbly offer myself to you, O ye thirty people, all my mom’s friends, who read this blog, and ask you, ever more humbly, to engage with me #onhere, because I live in the California suburbs and the apocalypse is coming and I’m feeling hella alone.

Anyway, I’ll see you Monday morning. Stay tuned.

the view across the South Bay, from Sunnyvale facing Fremont, from Baylands Park