I have a blog?

Yes.

After several years of people writing whatever they want on the internet, I'm in. I can't guarantee how long it will last, who will read it or that I won't say anything stupid, but I now have a blog.

You may ask, "Why now? Why, after the boom of Twitter and other strange update-technology, whould you just now start a blog?" Sure, blogging is nothing new. It might not even be considered 'cool' anymore. But I have my reasons.

As a human, I've known of the existence of blogs for a long time...I just never really saw the point. I didn't particularly care what random people thought about things. Then, for the past year or two, this view changed a bit. Not drastically, but I discovered that some of my friends had their own blogs. I would occasionally glance at them to see what kind of things they posted, sometimes becoming intrigued by lists they would make, but that was it. I never really gave much consideration to starting one of my own.

Since graduating from college in June, I've found myself with plenty of time on my hands (though I did just land a job at an ice rink...good think I got that journalism degree). I spent a lot of evenings on the internet, looking for sports news or interesting updates on Facebook (I know, thrilling). One night, though, something did catch my eye posted by Luke Florence. I don't know Luke extremely well...we met when I was a freshman in college, my least outgoing year. He then transferred to Heidelberg for a while before returning to OU. We played on a couple intramural teams together and would be out and talk occasionally, but didn't interact a whole lot in Athens, which I always thought was a shame. The post of his that caught my eye was a link to a post on his blog about his F'd Up Tourney. I became hooked on the Tourney and began to regularly check his blog for various updates (for an explaination of what captured my interest so well, check out Luke's blog here). For the first time in my life, I was consistently reading a blog...step one in overcoming my non-blog attitude.

Step two, which also happened to be the final step, came last week, essentially out of nowhere. While playing a game of NHL Hitz 2003 on Gamecube, an idea just came to me. I don't know how or why I thought of it, but I suddenly had a topic I knew I would legitimately enjoy writing about (I'll discuss what this idea is in my next post). Since I had hardly done anything productive over the past three months, writing a blog seemed like it would actually accomplish something...at the very least it would be a good chance to do some writing, which seems like something a journalist should do regularly. I ran the idea past two friends of mine, Kevin Hunt and Matt Barnes, and started to plan my blog.

I soon found out that the toughest part of starting a blog is the name. I'm not entirely confident people will care what I have to say to begin with, so who the hell is going to read it if it also has a terrible name? I figured something referencing my height was probably the way to go. Nearly every time I meet someone, they comment on my above average height (I'm 6'5", if you're wondering). I bounced some ideas off of Barnes and Hunt and thought I had settled on the title, "Too Tall for Tedium." It not only referenced my height, but utilized alliteration, which has always been my favorite literary device. The more I thought about it, though, the more unsure I became. Four words seemed like too many, and using a word like tedium just doesn't work. I then got the idea to start with one of my nicknames. While most people call me Schaf, I felt Spider worked better as a blogging alter-ego, so a big thanks to Andrew Braverman for dubbing me Spider after the dodgeball portion of the inaugural WOUB Sports Challenge. Since most of what you read here will be sports-related, it was natural to stick with alliteration and combine one of my 's' nicknames with 'sports.'

Now that you know how this blog came to be, you may ask what can you expect from it...what's this blog going to be about? As I told Barnes when he asked that very question, what is any blog about? It's pretty much going to be about whatever I feel like writing about. Usually that will be sports, but not always (hense the "and other things" sub-headline). It could be real writing, lists of things, or some crazy form of internet posting I don't even know about yet...that's the beauty of the blog.

If you've gotten through my whole introduction to and explaination of my blog, thank you and congratulations...now get ready for fun.