1) Your blog was one of the first I ever read. When did you begin blogging, and why?

I am, alas, deprived of any blogging anniversaries because I started by first blog in summer of 2002 but didn't post regularly until that summer. I was only a year or so removed from being a columnist for the Daily Cougar and I missed commenting on matters political. I was also not very far removed from a crumbled "relationship" and I needed to refocus some of my energies. At some point, for a variety of reasons, I moved away from politics and it became a place to share my thoughts on all sorts of matters, as well to tell stories of my day. I'm not sure what tomorrow holds for it all. I can feel myself starting to move back in a more political direction, but I'm also mulling over using it as a springboard for short story writing.

2) When I read your columns in The Daily Cougar, I remember remarking to law school peers about how one-sided and narrow the perspective reflected therein was.

Five years later, I now tend to think you're one of the more open-minded and balanced bloggers (people?) I 'know.' (Though I should mention that I think some measure of closed-mindedness is a relatively inescapable facet of the human condition -- we believe what we want to, to some extent).

What do you think this says about the columns you wrote, or my own predilections then vs. now, or your own predilections then vs. now?

The funny thing is that I was a lot more liberal than I am now. Certainly more libertarian, but also more liberal. For a variety of reasons that wasn't reflected in my columns. Partly it was to balance out the other left-leaning columnists and as time progress (and this was significant) I found myself a lot more comfortable espousing the conservative viewpoint on various issues. They seemed more intuitively correct. More so and more so the more I started exploring day-to-day issues. So as such I was a rightwing columnist before I was a rightwing thinker.

But that's not entirely your question. The narrow scope and point of view depicted in the columns came down to the 550-word limit a column was supposed to have. When I went over that I would get pushed to page four, which meant less readership. There really isn't much room to really expound on an issue in 550 words and present multiple sides in an issue (or, unfortunately, confront glaring counter-arguments). Some people could do it, but I couldn't. So I went full-force with the opinion that I had come to (sometimes half-heartedly). I frequently came across more forcefully than I actually felt.

Some of it was by word-limited necessity, some of it was by choice. Some days when people would stop me on the way to class, I much prefered "You're nuts, dude!" or "Fascist!" to people with more general complimentary things like my thoughtfulness or evenhandedness. It would also more forced me to defend my ideas if I put them more plainly and forcefully. The downside, though, are those columns that I look back on and now vehemently disagree with, archived with my name on the header for the rest of the history of the Internet.

3) The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short. Discuss.

The older I get, the more I agree with that. But not in an embittered or depressed way. My ability to delineate between black and white has diminished greatly. In life, we cannot avoid getting ourselves dirty. We cannot avoid being cold and ruthless, when the circumstances warrant. Sometimes it's for the best when you are. Sometimes justice is letting the criminal get away. It's hard to explain, really. I guess there was a recognition that life is too short to stay on the gravel the whole time to avoid getting dirty. And sometimes you have to know the wrongs your capable of to henceforth walk on the path of right. And to determine what exactly is wrong, what is right, and what can't be adequately described as either. I thought my teens were dramatic. Nothing compared to my twenties...

4) What, if anything, do you miss most about Texas?

Too much to list, probably. I mostly miss the people, the common identity that Texans with widely disparate experiences share. The diversity (not only ethnic, but of city and country) is something I apparently took for granted. And the music. Good heavens, do I miss the music.

5) Why do you like anime/manga so much?

Believe it or not, this is the short answer:

When I was a kid I watched a lot of television. A whole lot. I have probably seen every episode of Matlock, Family Matters, Batman: The Animated Series, and The Commish. I've seen entire seasons of just about every genre in existence. I am extremely familiar with American storytelling style (as it pertains to serial fiction). The most immediate appeal to anime, for me, is that it shifts the axis ever so slightly. The stories are coming from a slightly different foundation, different assumptions, and different expectations. So while I make no claim that Japanese animation storytelling is better than American storytelling, it's different enough that the mediocre stuff is more interesting to me than the mediocre American stuff. And there are things that they do better. Season-long story archs are much more prevalent. Shows in which you can just switch around the episodes without confusion are more rare. I like all different kinds of storytelling formats from the graphic novel to formulaic television to old-time radio shows. Anime gives me a new one.

Of course, it's not as new as it used to be and my interest has waned in recent years. But I do like variety and Anime is good to keep in the rotation.

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