"Like this, I don't need a picture of soap."

If you're looking for a well thought out, goodly written blog with quality content, please stop reading now and proceed to oneyearblogging.blogspot.com. My sister Danielle has proofread every important document I’ve written in life, destroys me in Scrabble, has a degree in communications from the University of Texas, two beautiful children to provide an abundance of high-quality writing material, interviews with famous authors, and pictures with celebrities from her days at Letterman. I, on the other hand, couldn’t beat my 3-year-old nephew in Scrabble, have my dad to write about, am pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, and therefore just now beat my previous record for the longest thing I’ve written in college. So before continuing, if you choose to continue, I am forcing every reader to get caught up on my sister’s blog if for some crazy reason you aren’t already.

Now that we’ve gotten rid of all of the readers who don’t truly love me (or at least love to make fun of me) I’ll introduce my plans for the blog.  Firstly, I was somewhat inspired by my sister’s awesome aforementioned blog, which is nothing new since my sisters have been inspiring me throughout my life. I’m currently 10,000 feet in the air flying from Minneapolis to San Jose (Think of a funny cloud computing joke, come on this is like your specialty!!) My grandpa passed away last year in November, so my dad and I are flying to his house in California to pack up his belongings and then driving them back to Michigan. That’s 36 hours of driving. Or 33 days of walking according to Google Maps.

I spent this past summer driving around the Midwest for my friend Brad’s dad’s expediting delivery company, I won best driver in high school, and I spent last year’s mid-winter break driving solo down to Charleston, South Carolina. The trip to Charleston was the longest drive of my life, 13 hours, and I enjoyed every second of it.

I learned 3 things from that drive: the Appalachians are beautiful to drive through in light snow, pay attention to the speed limit when you’re 15 minutes from your destination, and the golden arches of McDonalds take on a whole new meaning when you’re driving through southern Ohio and have been holding it for over an hour.

You’re probably thinking, “Wow, this guy’s pretty much a professional driver, he’ll be fine on his cross country trip,” and for the most part you’re right, I’m really looking forward to the next few days. But I have a confession to make. My love of driving stems from my love of music. I listened to every one of Weezer’s and the Killer’s albums, twice, on that 13 hour trip (rediscovering the lost art of listening to an entire album.) Hundred’s of drivers witnessed my head banging and air guitar, my voice was gone for a week. So here’s the dilemma: I can’t sing my heart out on a road trip with someone else in the car, my voice is terrible. I already feel bad enough when my friends have to deal with my voice on the 3 hour drive up north. 40 hours of my voice is a form of torture too evil for my worst enemies, let alone the Dandy Dentist (I’ve decided that Timothy Wallace Kowalski will be referred to by a different name every time he’s mentioned in the blog, I’d get tired of writing “dad” 1,000 times.)  I’m rambling now, I’m going to channel my technical writing skills, the only kind us engineer’s need, and get to the point.

I think it would be fun to have a written account of my trip.

Writing is an important skill to have no matter what you’re doing in life, and I haven’t done enough of it lately.

It will be a fun way to pass time, and I have a feeling that I’ll have a lot to write about because my dad is usually quite good at stimulating my thoughts.

The rest of my entries will be much shorter, and be focused around the title quote. There isn’t as much conversation when it’s just my dad and I on a trip, I’m more of a thinker than a talker and he respects that. For this reason part of me was wishing my mom was coming along with us. Before we left for the airport this afternoon we were sitting on the couch together and I saw that she was going through her iPhone and deleting all of her texts, one at a time (and she texts quite a lot for a 40-year-old). I asked her why she was doing this and she said she doesn’t like clutter, no surprise there. “I don’t need all of this junk on my phone, if there’s a cute picture or something I’ll kee– see like this, I don’t need a picture of soap!”  She also prints off all of her important emails from the computer, and then proceeds to delete them. Empty inboxes, organized file cabinets. I love this about her though; she doesn’t trust the technology, and why should she? (I’m a rare Luddite engineer) I apologize in advance for quoting you mom, and pops in the future, but this brings me to my next point. Please don’t let Daddio know about this blog until we get back from our trip. I’ll only put things I know he’d say in public on here, nothing too embarrassing or private, but I feel like he’ll hold back or (much more likely) try too hard to be funny and clever if he finds out what I’m doing. I’m sure he’ll be appreciative to have our trip documented anyways. If not, sorry daddy, I’ll delete it!

I realize this is more appropriate for a journal or diary. People continue to document their lives through blogs, Facebook, and Twitter in the digital age, but I feel like these mediums too often become used for what people want to hear instead of what the writer really feels. Journals and diaries are much more valuable for gaining self-awareness and accessing one’s life accurately because no one will ever read these things, so the writer is the only judge and is more likely to be honest with themself. Plus, way too many people are trying to be writers when they just don’t have a talent for it (me), and it gets hard for the truly gifted writers of the world (my sister) to be found through the never ending trash out on the Internet. With this in mind I’ll try my best not to pander to anyone or anything. I’m doing this for me. I just feel like I’m a very private person in general, so some people might enjoy the chance to tagalong on our trip via my brain.