TGL, Two Years Later

It was two years ago last Friday that I sat down in my Washington D.C. apartment and wrote and published the very first post on this here blog. I had spent the day at the 2009 Campus Progress National Conference where I was inspired by speeches from such luminaries as former President Bill Clinton, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, oh, and of course, Daily Show correspondent John Oliver. Having deliberated for the better part of the preceding months over whether or not to start my voyage into the unknown depths of the internets, I finally could not resist the temptation to stake a claim on my own personal corner of the virtual frontier.



When I go back and read that post now I hear a self-conscious writer (can I even call my nascent blogger self a writer?) dipping his toes into the blogging pool. I didn't even really know at the time what I wanted to write about -- baseball? comic books? (HA.) -- I simply knew that I had ideas that I wanted to share. Soon The Green Lantern became my outlet for my observations on the world of sustainability, urbanism, or the two together. It helped me apply concepts and theories I'd learn in the classroom to the current web of events we now find ourselves caught up in.



Several times I remarked that blogging took a certain bravado to think that people would want to read what I had to say. As I honed my message and my method, I began to attract more and more visitors. Some were friends, family members, and colleagues, and some were people I had never met before who were interested in hearing what I had to say. I feel incredibly fortunate to have seen my readership grow to the point it is at now. I had just under 500 pageviews last month:




Inherent in this endeavor was finding my "voice," something I knew would be paramount to this process way back in that very first post. In some ways I think my writing style has remained remarkably constant, though the strength of argument has improved. I've also learned to loosen up in some of my posts, because who likes to read something that's stuffy and boring (the answer is no one...). Over the past two years I've written on time-lapse videos of NYC, about 100 different electric car commercials, my love of biking, and cities from the sky. My most popular posts to date are Lock It Up and a recent rallying cry against hydraulic fracturing, Exxon, For Shame (both worth a read if you missed them the first time around).



I'm a firm believer in the idea that you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been. Luckily for me I've kept a careful record of where I've been, and I can say that I want to keep heading in the direction I've set out for myself. Like a planetary body set in motion I won't stop now. I can't, even if I foolishly wanted to or even tried. My life is in a period of transition -- I just graduated from college and am (finally) and "adult." Hopefully building upon these writings will help me to further determine the solutions to the crises of the 21st Century.

From those of you who have been there when the beginning began, to those of you for whom this is your first post, the only words I can say are thank you, thank you, thank you.