New Year, Same Corps, Slightly Different Bloggerel

Welcome to 2013, everybody. 

I'm sitting in a hallway in a former girls' school in Vicksburg, Mississippi, shamelessly borrowing the official Americorps wi-fi and occasionally playing a video game. It's a nice, relaxing, pleasantly rainy day, five days into the new year. 

I didn't make any New Years' resolutions this year, but I did do a lot of thinking about the way I've been keeping this blog. Usually, I've been sticking to an old-fashioned journalistic idea of how to tell a story: keep the storyteller out of it and focus on the story. I don't know how it feels from the perspective of the reader, but I feel like there's a lot of things I haven't said, a lot of emotions that I haven't been able to get across, because of that focus on keeping myself out of the story that my friends and I are helping to write. That's one reason why I put up relatively few blog posts in December; I felt like I'd said everything there was to say about my work, and I didn't feel like putting more out there about myself. 

In the new year--and more importantly, in our next project round--I'll be doing things a little differently. I should be posting more often, if Internet access allows, with more day-to-day stuff about FEMA Corps life and about our duties. I also want to feature other kinds of media outreach: you can follow my team's Twitter account at @SummitFiveFEMA, and my team and I will be producing videos about Corps life during our second stint in America's biggest city. The first one, about our life on the road, should be filmed this coming week; if all goes well, it'll be up on YouTube inside two.

These changes are partly because I feel I've been neglecting some aspects of Corps life, but also because hey, we're in the same place and doing the same work as we did in late 2012. I have to find some way to keep my blogging fresh. (Also, in addition to FEMA Corps blogs, I'll be posting more of the random digressions that I did a lot of before I was in the Corps. These could be on television trends, on space warfare, on Civil War history, on anything I feel like. If you like 'em, feel free to read 'em; if you're only here for FEMA Corps stuff, I'll put a disclaimer at the top of non-FEMA Corps posts so as to avoid confusion.)

Most importantly, thank you to everyone--friends and family, future Corps Members, parents, colleagues, FEMA personnel, anxious censors and so forth--who's tuned into this little corner of the Internet, whether once or many times, over the past five months. It's always good to know that people are listening, and it's even better when the things I have to say can actually help somebody get a clearer idea of what the Corps is all about. So once again, thank you for reading.