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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| There's a little sidebar to the left of this text that says I've been on Xanga since July 4, 2002. For nearly a quarter of my life--longer than I've ever lived in any one apartment, or in any one city for a continuous period of time--I've signed on to blogrings and collected and given eprops, stalked people I've never met in person, cringed with satisfaction at the photos people have posted and, every now and then, tried to give some written shape to my thoughts, to craft order out of the mess that is my brain.
None of that will stop, of course. Facebook covers most of that stuff now, anyway, and the reason I'm giving up this space in the first place is to move somewhere neater and cleaner, with some extra square-footage and a floorplan better equipped to house someone gingerly easing into his late twenties. It's hard to argue when what looks better and is easier to use is also free and ad-free. I don't really know why I've kept away from Blogger this long.
But if it isn't already clear from this ever-lengthening post, it is surprisingly hard to say goodbye to Xanga. Scattered among these seven years of entries are public musings that often met generous responses, the kind of kind comments that boosted an already-healthy ego which said, hey, maybe I can do this writing thing. And there are also the private frustrations, posted in secrecy like the wish you can't tell anyone for fear it won't come true, or the nightmare you can't tell anyone for fear it will.
Maybe I'll come back someday. Maybe I just won't cut it on a blogspot, not ready yet for the real world, big city, big lights and all. Maybe I'll return grovelling for my subscription base, even in its dwindling state. Maybe.
But for now, fellow Xangans, forgive me this betrayal as I venture into the unknown (and, starting next week, to India for a month) with my first shaky steps to full blogger adulthood. If I can give up IRC for ICQ, and ICQ for AIM, and AIM for MSN, and MSN for GChat, then I can do this. I can accept that, just as in real life, I took longer than others to grow out of blogosphere puberty. I can get readers without being on a blogring. I can live without eprops.
Yes. I. Can.
keaneshum.blogspot.com. See you there.
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| Been away for a while. Been thinking about writing. 
Some of you know the deal. When your parents move around a lot, you box and unbox a lot of old stuff. So I was doing me some unboxing today. And there was this napkin. I should have written down the time and place that I found it, but I promise, it's a true story.
It was sometime towards the end of college, probably senior year. I was at just another American airport--could've been LGA, SFO, or anywhere in between, I'm not sure--and I sat down at one of those small round tables at a Starbucks, the kind that seats two but is also just right for one person and your laptop as long as you don't feel guilty about it. And there was this napkin.
And here I was, aspiring to both write and be wise, thinking this had to be some kind of promotional set of napkins, where every napkin has an inspirational quote printed in very casual, impromptu, and yet elegant handwriting. But there were no other napkins like it. And when I brought my eyes close to it, sure enough, there were (and still are) dimples in all the places pen would've come to paper.
The handwriting is gorgeous. If you were a font, I would type in all 12 points of you. But just the way you are, no italics, no bold. Makes me wonder what her hand looked like and why she left the napkin there. Sitting, just minutes before, at the seat I found, had she overheard someone else say it? Did she rush to board a flight, and where did it take her? Was this supposed to end up in one of her old boxes instead of mine?
This memory, so vivid to me, meant for someone else. Left at a table, in an airport, then in a box, shipped across oceans, so I could take up its cause. The least I can do: study to be wise, and write. And write well.
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| I need to stop reading the news.
I don't know if it's because I can't get over the campaign, or it's just the grown-up version of the internet wandering I used to do--including on here, poor, dying Xanga--but I need to stop. I've followed Tom Daschle for a long time, ever since I realized he looks exactly like my high school drama teacher, but does it really matter whether I know which line he screwed up on his tax return? Do I really need the Wall Street Journal to tell me that more people are going back to school in this economy? Should I even want to judge why a woman with six children decided to have eight more?
Because in the meantime, I've been neglecting things. Writing. Reading. Real reading. Basketball. Things I genuinely enjoy more than line upon digital line of 10-point Times New Roman. My velveteen rabbits.
Scares me to think of trying to count up all the time I've spent reading news stories that are outdated by the hour, every hour. All the places I could have gone, just in this city; the museums, Arlington, a tour of the Capitol. Probably even an internship in the Capitol.
So for this, my personal new year's resolution: read the lesser, less, read (and write) the morer, more.
Also sleep more.
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Headed out the door at 6:30 a.m. and reached the Mall an hour later. Began placing the day in context.
Lots of people, lots of flags.
I get the feeling that our generation often feels shortchanged. For those of us who yearn for the dramatic and the consequential, it seems like ours always pale in comparison to our parents' years, or our grandparents'. We don't have world wars to fight, or communism to escape. In school we learned about the assassinations and the civil rights movement and the hippies and moon landings we missed by decades, and at home we've been told of anti-Chinese riots and the Japanese. Our lives seem set, and to predictable rhythms.
But as I stood on the Mall today, I thought about just my time here, in this country. That just over seven years ago, I was 90 miles away from the deadliest attack on American soil, and maybe the most haunting terrorist act anywhere. I thought about just the last year, that in between this inauguration and election, I also watched another great nation fulfill its own century-old dream of hosting the Olympic Games.
I thought about just the presidential elections I remember clearly, and recalled taking a little portable TV with me to a high school basketball game because I wanted to know who was going to win the most closely contested race in U.S. history, the one election more than any other which was supposed to show us once and for all why every vote counts. Turning the clock back, I thought about other events I experienced first-hand: air raid drills during the first democratic elections in Taiwan or the fireworks that marked the end of the British Empire. And then those events I remember well but watched from a distance: the tsunami, the Y2K bunkers stocked with shotguns and canned food.
Then I thought about things I may not remember, but have happened well within my lifetime. Tiananmen Square. The Berlin Wall. And that's just those that have in some way affected my life; they say nothing of genocide in Rwanda, the Balkans, now Darfur, all during my lifetime. The end of Apartheid. The creation of the Internet. Obviously, the list goes on.
 So when I watched a black man named Barack Hussein Obama become President of the United States at noon today, I thought about how history tends to paint a stunning backdrop for all our lives, no matter what generation. I thought about how grateful I was to have been here today, or in Beijing in August, simply out of choice and the desire to be at the center of the world, wherever that may be. And I thought about how today was a good day, and just how good a day it was, and how lucky I was, to be a part of such a good day.
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