You know, I’ve been thinking. What is this blog thing all about anyway? I don’t mean blogs in general, just mine. Does it have any purpose? Does it need one? Am I making profound observations about life and the world around me, or is it just a convenient way to feel like I’m keeping in contact with people without having to make actual contact?

What in the world brought on this attack of blogistentialism? (can I trademark that word?) you may ask? Today I began listening to an audiobook I just bought, Julie and Julia:365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen, by Julie Powell. It’s about how the author set out on a quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and wrote a blog about it. I first heard about it last summer, while I was in the States. I was reevaluating things after my year in Moscow, and Julie was making the rounds of the talk show circuit. The thing that piqued my interest was learning that Julia Child never took a cooking course until she was 35 years old, the same age I am now, for seventeen more days anyway. After I began listening on my walk home from work today, I realized this is pretty much aimed at a female audience, but whatever. It’s a book about a book about food. Books and food are two of my favorite things in life, so what’s not to love?

Anyway, my point is a blog about working through a cookbook is a discrete, finite thing, easy to get your brain around and not that big of a leap to find the deeper meaning in the execution of such a task. The Blog of Brian is a Seinfeldian romp through the winding, cobwebbed passages of the funhouse that is my brain. Careful, or you’ll get lost. So here I am now, sitting at the computer with a cigarette and a cup of coffee that tastes exactly like Chinese mud (see yesterday’s entry), pondering the meaning of BoB.

As the name suggests, The Blog of Brian is first and foremost, about me. So the next question is who am I? For convenience sake, I’ll use some adjectival labels to answer that. I am a 35-year old, gay, left-handed, recovering you-name-it, inactive Mormon, American male English teacher of French, Irish and English origins who grew up in Arizona, considers Portland, Oregon his ‘adopted’ home town and who now lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. On the one hand, my blog is about all of those things, and on the other hand it is about none of them. While I talk about teaching a lot, it is not a teaching blog. I live in Korea, but this, in essence, is not a blog about living in Korea. By the same token, neither is it a recovery blog, a disaffected Mormon blog, nor a blog about being gay, American, or left-handed. As you can well see by the links, all those niches are already filled (except the left-handed one, couldn’t find a decent left-handed blog. Hmm…)

Ok well, I’m going to have to leave it here for now. I was starting to write a mission statement for my blog, but it’s gotten too late, and I want to get at least this much posted before I go to bed. Now I know why I don’t post more often, because it takes hours for me to write a post I’m satisfied with. Then if I include links it takes that much longer.

Read Part two tomorrow (approximately)