I originally started my blog (then called “Life as a feast”) two months after graduating from college, with my goal being not just to chronicle my food experiences, but also to encourage myself to cook regularly and try new food routines. In my very first post back in August 2010, one of the rules I laid out for my blog was: “Any discussion of my personal/academic/work life will be limited to immediate food-related topics.” That worked very well for the first year, and even early in medical school when my weekly schedule was quite predictable. But school and life became busier and less compartmentalized, I got behind on posts, and then my blogging became quite infrequent (an understatement).
Admittedly, this doesn’t offer much confidence for how things might go this time. But recently I’ve been wanting to write again, at least a little, and not just about food. I still like photographing and describing food experiences, and I intend to keep improving my cooking and baking skills. However, I am also thinking about some new blog posts on topics that in fact have a lot to do with my personal/academic/work life: my changing/improving feelings about living in Los Angeles, for example, or particularly impactful books, or maybe even some of the unexpected lessons that grad school has taught me so far.
And as I do more and more academic or “professional” science writing in the formats of manuscripts, protocols, and grant proposals, it’s an especially nice change of pace to write in a more casual tone on non-technical subjects (or even downright fluffy subjects like, say, cake), without organizing tons of citations. It's also lovely to see my writing quickly laid out in a pretty format instead of spending hours nudging finicky paragraphs into a certain number of 0.5”-margined-pages. Why blog about anything, though? It would be more private to just journal for myself, or to write something and email it to my family and five friends who might actually read it. That would also be a smaller commitment than posting regularly, even at long intervals. But I find fun in the blogging process, in the act of writing and posting something with which others can interact, no matter how trivial the product or how small the audience.
So at the start of this new year, I’m transitioning this blog into something sort of new for myself. I haven’t figured out exactly what it’s going to be or how long it will last, but there it is. Here’s to 2015!
