1)  What is the quality you most admire in a blogger?

Openness.  There are different types of openness, and all the bloggers I read regularly or who’ve inspired me exhibit at least one kind, if not more.  The most obvious openness is the kind in which the blogger really puts her/himself out there, no holds barred, every foible, every wrinkle right there on the screen, often tempered with humor, self-deprecating or otherwise.  I’m not this kind of blogger, I just can’t do it, and I admire those that do for their courage and self-assurance (even when they’re writing about how they’re not self-assured).  Another kind of openness is that evidenced by sites that try to build connections and community, whether it’s by connecting people via personal stories and dialogue or by networking around issues via news, information, and links.  And still another, more subtle, but almost most important, kind of openness is a blogger’s own reaching out, whether via e-mail or comments or linking or referring.  All this builds a feeling of community, brings me back for more, and pushes me to be that kind of blogger.

 

2)  What is your most marked blogging characteristic (or, how would you describe your blog)?

Some would say that I have a tendency to be a bit too wordy at times [or to use too many long or run-on sentences], but for the life of me I don’t understand why.  [Heh.]  [Did I mention the overuse of parentheticals and the “heh”?  No?  You didn’t notice?]

 

3)  What is your greatest virtue as a blogger?

I started blogging because, as a new SAHD, I loved reading the parentblogs I’d stumbled upon, and I wanted to contribute to the new virtual community I had found.  Then I had the opportunity to co-found a group blog by Asian American dads and thus combine my new passion, family/parenthood/SAHDhood, with my old passion, race/identity/diversity/social justice.  I think what I try to do, as a blog reader and writer, is to look for those points of intersectionality and, by writing posts, leaving comments, and referring others to pertinent sites and issues, try to do my part in building community (-ies) around those points.

 

4)  What do you regard as the principle defect of your blog?

My tendency to go back-and-forth between being super-serious [read: taking myself too seriously or trying to be poignant or find deeper meaning or something all the time] and being sarcastic/funny [read: trying to be humorous but, I fear, really not succeeding all too well].

 

5)  What character of fiction do you most wish had a blog?

Okay, time to put on my nerd hat.  [Did I ever mention that my senior thesis in Ethnic Studies was an analysis of how the mixed-species characters on all incarnations of “Star Trek” were stand-ins of American (mis)understandings of mixed-race people?]  I’d be the first RSS feed subscriber to sign up if, in some alternate universe, there was a group blog on mixed-species identity issues in the modern United Federation of Planets, with regular rotating contributors including Spock, B’Elanna Torres, Deanna Troi, Alexander Rozhenko and his dad Worf (to write about transracial adoption, of course).  Heh.

 

6)  What historical or real life person do you most wish had a blog?

Okay, this is cheesy, but my late grandfathers.  My Japanese American maternal grandfather had Parkinson’s and died when I was in junior high, so I never got to ask him about why he was a “no-no” boy during WWII or what it was like being a JA gardener in a changing post-war LA.  And my Jewish paternal grandfather died when I was in college, so, while I knew him better and heard lots of his stories, I never really got to know him adult-to-adult.  They both saw so much change in their lifetimes, and yet somehow, at least a part of their very different lives led to me.  I’d have loved to have been able to read their lives blog-style, in their words, as they lived them.

 

7)  What is your present state of blog (present state of mind as a blogger)?

 

8)  What is your blog motto?