Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging

I.

Pro-blogging. I am pro-bloggin.

On this piece of paper, I am blogging in our dear friend Martha's London flat. I am alone with a crashed computer. I have for tools a pen and a torn scrap of paper.

We have come up with all sorts of new widgets and apps in the course of tracing histories of ancient dialogues. This is what fills the empty space when the cyber has quieted. These are emerging technologies, too delicate even to reveal, which flew by in conversation too fast to write down.

We did discuss campfire apps (those which keep mosquitoes and biting insects away) - until we arrived at teenager apps (those which emit pitches from your phone to keep those between 11-21 years old away). We discussed million dollar apps for shopping and those for keeping our conversations on track. You see, we live in modernity.

Yet, I sit here a-scribbling. I am pro-bloggin.

I could bore you with our reams of data and news... it would be more noteworthy or worthwhile than this. Instead, I can take you where we have been. I am pro-bloggin (or is this proto-blogging). I am doing the type of exercise which takes place on pen and paper. And, I am reduced to pen and paper. I blame planned obsolescence.

So....our computer crashed. If you have been reading, you know this.

With a crashed computer and a race across four very historical (and yet very new to us) countries over a little less than two weeks; I am asking myself to run the last dash efforts as travel blogger. In this case, for this blog, what does it mean to lose all our travel technologies?

As I sat down and composed what thoughts defining these two words might mean to me ('travel' & 'blogger'), I came up with some formulaic answers which (a) might be of some use to our fellow travelers and blogging or blog friendly readers; and (b) I realized, yet again, that by unpacking our mission of exchange, service, exploration and discovery, I could discover deeper within myself sources of inspiration, language, and action. In the blogosphere, I realize in the actions and words of myself and others, that we are all becoming forces of combining self-interests.

Travel: involving every facet of life in relation to its other; ability to succeed; management of staying busy; preservation of health; enjoyment of self beyond (1) either self; or, (2) selected zone of self protection and/or self-awareness.

Blog: to publicly share and garner interest in travel.

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (Part Two)

II.

When my world was inverted (instead of pleasurably introverted as it is as a cyberwriter); when all that I could do from dawn to dusk and then into the wee hours of the morning was put the nose to the grindstone and achieve work, I was not alone. Everyone around me was tweeting me - or so it seemed; metaphorically. When I had adopted this pro-forma project philosophy, all I could breathe was work.

Lucky for me, I was in disaster recovery-mode. I was nurturing my resiliency, personally, socially, culturally, I was at one with the need to use physical and intellectual rigor to fight for the existence of the place where I was from (which through the work of the US Government and the natural phenomenology of hurricanes had wrought severe damage to this hometown). I...digress.

When one is caught up in one's projects, it is hard to turn off the phone.

In our modern world, the evolutions from beepers to tweeters ties us to technologies in ways which we love and absorb. Sometimes, we hate these technologies too; but, usually this sense is frowned upon or considered anti-social. So, let's assume that we love our technologies.

Anyway, when I was in the thrust of these previous epochs of my work life, I loved taking airplane flights. I used the airplane as analogy for what I encouraged my fellow disaster recovery comrades to also embrace - the retreat from 24 hour phone and message cycles.

In travel, we have so many opportunities to be something temporarily. This ambiguity speaks to the case of our modern life.

Last night, we watched a theater production of the "Prisoner of 2nd Avenue," a 1970's play by Neil Simon. It was a surprisingly hip and current rendition of times changing around those who cannot move forward. I could not place it fully in my own life. Yet, it had angst and urbanity.

At the beginning of theater and cinema, as the curtains rise, the managers they have conceived of nice ways of asking us to turn off our cellphones.

It is too bad there are not more ways of finding out how to do this. It is too bad that as a blogger I have not found better apps and widgets for helping me manage the distance between the objective to blog, write, and serve the communities at home (or those we visit on our trip), and how to enjoy the spirituality of travel once the netbook [laptop] gets sick. In previous millennia, it was your own sickness from the elements which brought you down; now, it is sickness from removal of portable media. I am unsure which illness is graver.

That said, I am off to take in more of London (camera in pocket, pen and scrap of paper in breast pocket).....

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Semi-Pro travel blogger: Pro-blogging (trois)

III.

Do we blog therefore to exist? Or, for us, is blogging an individual act of reaching out beyond mores of public acceptance (therefore being as an insidious and rebellious act)?

Is blogging the newest and least developed version of formal editorial publication?

Do we bring forth emerging concepts for a radical individualized project?

What does it mean to be a travel blogger?

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