It’s been over a year since I last blogged. To be honest, I didn’t miss it. To borrow a phrase from Anna Wintour: It’s not art. It’s not even culture. It’s advertising. And, as instruments of compulsive solipsism go, blogs aren't even that great; Facebook status updates and Twitter have long since supplanted the blog as the electronic megaphone de rigueur.

But this doesn’t change the fact that an online presence is something of a necessity these days. It’s the business card of our increasingly branded age. It’s exhausting though, all that outrage. Someday, someone will write a script that autoblogs. A do loop statement that returns roughly 300 words of random, petty indignation and increments until x = infinity. Are you listening, Mark Zuckerberg?

And yet, for all my whinging about the tedium of self-expression, I remain profoundly grateful for the ability to communicate in the medium of written language. It’s something that hits me every time a student misses a word like “adept” on a vocabulary test. “Dissipate” is another one that seems to give them all trouble. I have no idea when I learned those particular words, but I know it was sometime before my freshman year of college, when my students come to me. It’s not too late for them to learn these things, but it’s probably too late for them to learn these things. Who failed these kids, I often wonder. Their teachers? Their parents? 50 Cent? I guess it doesn’t really matter. They’ll make it through the rest of their lives probably never using “dissipate” correctly in a sentence, and it will only occur to people on the other side of the conversation, those of us somehow lucky enough to be able to do things like read a book without effort or compose a self-absorbed blog entry, that the deficit is even there.

-JT