My Tea Blog Is Melting, Melting!

In my tiny corner of the blogoverse, The 39 Steeps had found a well-appreciated audience over the course of our first year together. And then I got sick, and I stopped posting. And look what happened: Our page views dropped to the level that they had during about the first week of the blog's existence. Wow. I wonder, had I kept writing regularly, what the circle of tea friends I would have met might be by this point.

So it goes to show, while the wages of sin is death, the wages of ignoring your blog is, well, blog death. Of course, every trained journalist would already know this. But blogging is, for me and many others, an experiment. Here we are, in possession of the greatest forum for self-expression since Gutenberg, and it still requires us to sit down in front of an empty page and write.

So we'll keep writing, hopefully. I have to say, though, that unlike some of the tea connoisseurs of my acquaintance, I don't know if I can keep up a daily writing schedule about what I'm drinking every day or week. "Look, everyone! Brown leaf juice!"

{ Notice any similarities?
The 39 Steeps viewer stats look just like Mt. Everest,
just not as, you know, majestic and beautiful }

news from the home front

Today, I'm going to continue my captioning, trying to keep up with my deadlines. A bit later, I'll meet with the principal of Valeo Academy, where I will now be teaching English Literature and Composition (!) to high school students. One part of me says, "Oh, poor them, being stuck with me." But that's false self-effacement. While I'm a bit worried, as any new teacher would be, that the kids will loathe my class and we'll make one another miserable, I think it'll be fun.

In fact, I feel like, in some numinous ways, I've been preparing for this for the last 20 years, having innumerable conversations and hours of contemplation about aesthetics, about thinking Christianly in a lost world, about discovering how to think robustly and confidently, about how to grow as a creator and a communicator. (Yaaah! Numinous and innumerable in the same sentence. Usually, I my verbal tic is to repeat the word. In this case, I used two entirely different words that just sound alike. Leave it or edit? Leave it, but blargh.)

The wonderful thing about schools like Valeo Academy is that, as a private institution, they can acquire quirky, gifted, unusual people like me who would ordinarily not be hired into the public school system. My wife-- who could easily work in either environment and is profoundly qualified-- is happy that I'll be joining her at Valeo, and that I'll be using my expressive gifts and enthusiasm about all things Language, while still meeting the bills with my growing business, Chicago Captioning 2.0. (The 2.0 signifies that I'm restructuring and reengaging with my clients and future clients in new ways I hadn't thought of before. And "2.0" is just so darned '90s-retro, I couldn't resist.) So Professor Steven, here we come. (Unfortunately for the students at Valeo, I don't look nearly as good as this guy.)

{ If the Professor was so smart,
why were they on the island for so many years?
It's because he wanted Marianne, isn't it. }

So I'll be taking my tea table and a stash of good stuff to an actual office, where I'll be relocating my business (sort of) whilst also teaching Chaucer, and Shakespeare, and all them other high-falutin' Greeks. Change! Change is good!

Now back to work. Stop distracting me with your siren song, tempting me to write about tea and life!