Assignment #2: A Stroll Through the Blogosphere
I spent a good amount of time reading blogs the other day. I enjoy reading people’s little musings, creeping through their words and nesting in their textual consciousness. (I even have a blog of my own — I’m on the road for a seven-month span from January to August, so I figured it would be nice to keep my folks updated.) But when I set out on the trail for an Amsterdam-related travel blog, I always became distracted.
I left a text-heavy blog on transportation in Amsterdam because it linked me to a cheesecake restaurant in Rotterdam. My phone rang when I was perusing a Dutch sports blog and I sort of lost interest from there. I stumbled upon a great music blog, but it was not in English and half the bands looked like an amalgam of heroin chic and Justin Bieber. One blog, which I thought was devoted to dos and don’ts for tourists and first-time visitors, turned out to be a cannabis farmer’s forum for growing techniques and convenient marijuana depots. Rats.
The one blog that caught and held my attention was this one, written by a travelogue named Dhull. I appreciate a chap who writes with a similar voice as mine. (I’m assuming Dhull is a dude, lest I self-emasculate my writing style.) The blog is not fettered by typical structure. Dhull tosses around pictures and paragraph alignment like he’s trying to pull off his best Picasso impression. He toys with the reader’s attention, using easy-on-the-brain language, spacing, and pictures to create a fun milieu on the page. What the blog amounts to is a big chunk of information that feels easy and reads well; that, or Dhull is a cretin and I have simple taste. In either case, that is what I like to see in a blog.
If we are talking “play,” Dhull satisfies that in spades. His amusement with both the experiences and their recollections emanates from his blog. I am not sure of his age, but he reads young. I would guess that he was a kid out of college who got the travel bug and wanted the world to share in his delight. In a lot of ways, that is what I hope to convey in my blog and in my experiences in Amsterdam. The city is rife with opportunity for academic, philosophical, and architectural-acumen growth, but it is also a city known to be fun and kooky. As a group, we should explore that! To invoke my favorite red-headed philosopher, we should take chances, make mistakes, and get messy. Dhull wouldn’t accept any less.
