This October marked the four-year anniversary of this blog. What initially began as merely an online extension of my overwrought personal journal entries has since blossomed into a time-consuming diversion from more important activities like homework and sleep. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Say what you will about Internet culture and the blogging “fad,” but I have very few creative pursuits I can point to with any pride or confidence that are as well-archived or easily-accessed as this blog. For better or worse, it has provided me with more of an incentive to write than any other audience or deadline. There might be something unhealthy about the fact that I get more excited about writing a new blog entry than writing a piece for workshop, but then, the writing samples that got me into my MFA program began as blog entries, so it’s all part of the circle of life, the Eightfold Path, Der Ring des Nibelungen, et cetera.

By the numbers, my blog looks something like this: I have written 1,077 entries, the most common subcategory of which is music, at 300 entries. 70 entries are at least tangentially about Chicago; 41 about Iowa City; 48 about Minneapolis; 37 about Grinnell. 46 are about politics; 51 are about literature. Nearly all of them are, in some way, about Ransom.

According to Google Analytics and Site Meter, I average about 75 unique hits a day. Most people find my site through friends’ blogs, Google, and—this one surprised me—Facebook. (I knew I signed up for some reason!)

While perusing my archives, I thought I’d compile a list of my favorite entries. (This kind of navel-gazing ordinarily makes me pretty uneasy, but then, what is blogging if not navel-gazing?) But because my desire to make people laugh equally as strong as my desire to be taken seriously as a writer, and presuming for the sake of argument that those two objectives are mutually exclusive or otherwise at odds with each other, I’ve divided my own favorite posts into two categories which I could call serious and funny, except often one will include elements of the other. So I’ll call them Sincere and Smartass. Here they are, in no particular order:

Sincere:

1. My post about turning thirty.
2. The one about my first year of grad school.
3. Hey, remember James Frey?
4. A moment of profound embarrassment.
5. RIP Pope John Paul.
6. A rare foray into fiction (PDF).
7. Observing geopolitical events from a distance.
8. RIP Hooter the Hamster.
9. Childhood and personal injury.
10. This is cheating, but any of the 50 pieces I wrote about my 50 favorite albums.

Smartass:

1. Any of the Stereogum Douchebags of the Week.
2. An exegesis of Eighties sitcom theme songs.
3. Reviewing excellent films like Great Terminator Reloaded of the Rings.
4. My glowing review of a classic album.
5. Blog entry Mad Libs.
6. An important discourse on pedagogy.
7. I throw my amateur-DJ hat into the mashup ring.
8. Cataloguing my pet peeves, exhaustively.
9. Breaking news about the new Nolan album.
10. The first appearance by a guest blogger.

Maybe my perspective is skewed, but I think it’s a good sign that most of these are from the last year or so.

And in conclusion, let’s talk nuts and bolts. I’m offering five American dollars to any coders out there who can turn my Archives menu into a drop-down affair, and twenty American dollars to any aspiring desingers who want to do an overhaul on my tired old CSS.