Slow-blogger: that's me

The Contentious Introvert is not exactly "trendy." The digital age has in many ways passed him by. He doesn't have a single body piercing. He thinks "blackberry" is a pie flavor. And his clothes are not exactly on the cutting edge of anything, except maybe the mid-1980s. So it should come as no surprise that yours truly WAS surprised to learn that he's at the vanguard of a new trend, a trend that I heard about on a talk show the other day, a talk show whose name escapes me. But, according to whatever cultural observer was being interviewed on this show, a current fashionable trend is: slow blogging.

OK, now you've gotta ask the question. (Ask it, already!) What is "slow blogging," you want to know? Well, I THINK it's sort of what I've been doing here for the last year. Rather than running the reader through every boring and trivial detail of my life (I ate peach yogurt for breakfast, I met my friend Biff for coffee at Caribou, I watched the latest episode of CSI Miami, I picked my nose twice, and so on--I guess this is "fast blogging"), slow blogging involves relatively short but focused mini-essays on something of substance. Further investigation revealed that there is even a slow-blogging website (surprise, surprise) that writes about this approach more elegantly:

"Slow Blogging is a reversal of the disintegration into the one-liners and cutting turns of phrase that are often the early lives of our best ideas. Its a process in which flashes of thought shine and then fade to take their place in the background as part of something larger. Slow Blogging does not write thoughts onto the ethereal and eternal parchment before they provide an enduring worth in the shape of our ideas over time." (ooh---heavy) [http://toddsieling.com/slowblog/?page_id=10]

Translation: slow-bloggers don't tell you if they took a bath or took a shower, if they ate Bruegger's bagels or Einstein bagels, if their navel is an "inney" or an "outey"--these things should not be part of "the ethereal and eternal parchment." In many ways, that's what I've been going for. Little did I realize that I'm out in front of something that's been identified as trendy! Good to know.

By the way, for breakfast I had strawberry yogurt, for lunch I had vegetable-bean soup with melted cheese, and for supper it was a noodle/tofu/zucchini/green pepper stir fry. And I've picked my nose at least three times. And Einstein bagels actually are better than Bruegger's. But I also believe that the American lifestyle is wasteful in ways that we can only begin to imagine, understand, or appreciate. And I think we have a lot to learn from Buddhism. So there--hail to all of you fellow slow bloggers!