A couple of days ago I wanted to explain why I have been writing this blog in Spanish. I had been doing some spring cleaning on the blog: behind-the-scenes maintenance on WordPress.com, including updating plug-ins; trimming clutter from the sidebar, since I haven’t been using categories or tags; and adding my own Now page, inspired by Derek Sivers.

I realized a few things while poking around settings for the Jetpack plug-in. First, the Akismet filter has prevented over 300 spam comments each month this year. It’s amazing that my little ol’ blog receives so many ridiculously worded comments, even with the marginal cost to send spam being incredibly low. Thinking about that reminds me of this message on Usenet that I remember from as far back as 1986:

This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

Second, I saw that I continue to receive few visitors, which is fine and even liberating, for reasons described yesterday. The visitors that I do get seemed focused on posts that I write in English. Beyond the front page, hardly anyone seems to engage with anything that I write in Spanish.

Third, I saw that all of my automatic reposting to social media had been deactivated. Twitter/X no longer supports cross-posting, and Facebook allows it only on pages rather than personal profiles, so I only activated automatic reposting to LinkedIn.

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After reactivating LinkedIn cross-posting, I saw an uptick in traffic to this blog. This concerned me, because I didn’t want to spam friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, flooding their feeds with Spanish every day, especially because I suspect most of them don’t understand the language well. So I decided to explain, in English, why I am writing in this language that is not my first. Leading up to that explanation, I started with why I write at all and then why I blog. Now here we are at last, where I explain why I write in Spanish.

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The short answer is that I want to become more fluent in Spanish. My skills are reasonable; I’m now at the point where I can interact with people, not only in set transactions at stores and restaurants, but also asking questions at museums and talking at length with fellow travelers I’ve just met. Sometimes I can simply understand something I hear or see, without even consciously switching over to the task of translation. 

While my listening and reading skills are fairly strong, I lag a bit in expressing myself in speech and writing. For this reason, I decided to blog in Spanish. I’m finding that this makes me a more careful writer: not knowing the language nearly as well, I strip down and clarify my thoughts. I keep a tighter focus on the main point I am making, becoming less distracted by my own side thoughts. Overall, I think slightly differently, while having just as much fun with wordplay, sentence structure, and argument construction.

It’s true that I will build less of an audience this way. After all, English is the favorite language of the Internet, not just of my own personal network. But again, I’m not overly concerned about getting hits.

So this is my way of explaining to acquaintances why they will see Spanish from me every day. If they wish, they can always unsubscribe from my feed, much as I described I am doing from my own email subscriptions, in Paulatinamente, which coincidentally is the first Spanish post that they would have received since I reconnected this blog to LinkedIn.

Yesterday I wrote about re-establishing reflective writing as a daily habit. Today I want to describe why I have decided, at least for now, to do this in a blog.

Blogging is a return to form, a form that I took up more than twenty years ago when we lived in Santa Fe, a bit after I completed my book of concrete poetry. The academic calendar at St. John’s College no longer allowed me to teach with the supportive community of writers every summer in the L&T Program at Bard College. I needed an outlet for my creative non-fiction, so I began to blog.

Buried in computer directories, I can see that I began to write Best Let or Get on November 23, 2002. The first entry was “Thanksgiving speeches” and for a while it was one of the top Google hits for that search term. I continued to blog there until January 2004, by which time we were living in Manhattan. I had at least one regular reader, someone who commented on my posts and at one point asked my advice about college planning for his children.

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Blogging a liminal place, a safe place. It’s neither fully public nor private. It’s where I can collect some of my private thoughts, chosen from those I am willing to share publicly.

In the act of writing there is always the burdensome question of audience: for whom are you writing? For me, blogging partly absolves me of that concern, or at least makes the answer to that question less distinct. In this blog I am not obliged to write for others, and yet in the act of publishing I must not be writing only for myself. Still, because this audience is small and I don’t know of any regular visitors, I feel more free. If I felt like these posts counted more, I might tighten up; as it stands, the stakes are not high. The audience is abstract, is abstracted, is subtracted, is sublimed. The only certain audience is my selves, both current and future. When I do look back at what I’ve written, I sometimes surprise myself in the rediscovering of who I was. It’s a kind of journaling, which I used to do by hand when I was younger.

However, writing on the computer makes it easier to edit than in a journal. Blogging stands between entirely spontaneous freewriting and more heavy edited formal writing. Each entry is a kernel of thought, which I could someday combine or grow into a longer work, although they also stand on their own, with their own value even if they don’t get used later. Each post is longer than the scribble of a stray thought, but less extensive than a full essay.

Overall, blogging removes friction. There is immediacy between thinking and writing, between writing and publishing. Boom!

Recently I resolved to write every day.

In chapter 5 of Atomic Habits, James Clear advocates creating a new habit as an “implementation intention”: I will behavior at time in location. In the iOS app Atoms he expands on this statement: I will habit, time/location so that I can become type of person I want to be. As he summarizes in chapter 2, The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs about yourself.

The intention I wrote for myself is: I will open Mars Edit and write one sentence, every day at 08:08, to become a better writer. 

I decided to make the habit small and specific. I had hoped that the simple act of opening MarsEdit and writing a sentence would immediately lead to writing more, and indeed I am now on a 19-day streak of starting and completing a blog entry. By the way, years ago I chose MarsEdit to manage my blogs because this app is MacOS-compatible, because it allows me to write and store my work locally (I abhor overreliance on the Internet and outside services, which is why I almost always go through the trouble to set up my email accounts with POP rather than IMAP), and because the software is license- rather than subscription-based (which is one reason I actually use Streaks for habit tracking, although I do recommend downloading Atoms for its excellent advice).

I decided on 08:08 because it’s at the start of the day and at an oddly specific time. I’ve generally been awake at that time for at least an hour, if not three. In truth, I’ve been counting the habit unbroken as long as I begin writing sometime in the morning. Today, after flying a redeye and having an early morning doctor’s appointment, I’ll still count it.

I decided to become a better writer because this is foundational to my being. It is a superb way to organize, clarify, develop, and record my thoughts. This is especially important now that I am liberated from everyday job responsibilities. During my career as a professor, I was focused on teaching and advising students and on building and enhancing programs. These activities were intellectually and emotionally satisfying, but nearly all of my writing was in service for others. Now that I have the free time to pursue my own scholarly interests, I want to rebuild that muscle of writing for my own sake.