urbanmennonite.com

Do you know what this is?  It is a momentous occasion in the life of UrbanMennonite so mark it well.  For today, with this very post, she has reached her 500th entry.

I started this blog on Jan 25, 2008, with my about page, an assignment from a professor and a URL.  In the past 570 days, I have ended up writing almost the equivalent of a post per day (except for that missing three weeks earlier this summer).  And even though my thoughts are all over the place, my content ended up being kinda what I thought it might when I started out.  Politics, living in the city, being Mennonite, movies, music and books, things that interest me and things that annoy me.

Things I have learned:

• I am no Andrew Sullivan. I’m doing lucky to get something up every couple of days.  How some of these guys do it is beyond me.  There’s no way you can sustain what people like Yglesias and Ackerman do part-time.  It isn’t possible.
• No one is going to come and make a movie out of my blog.  But if they do, please let Kate Winslet play me (she is the Meryl Streep of my generation, after all).
• Even though I’m not anonymous (it’s pretty easy to figure out who I am if you put the clues together), there is something to blogging under another persona.  It forces me to distance myself a little bit — and I think that’s a good thing.
• The Swartzendruber Amish are maybe just a little bit crazy.
• There’s a pretty interesting group of Mennonite (and recovering-Mennonite) bloggers out there. You guys have great blogs … so keep it up!

Things I haven’t done yet that I am still hoping to do:

• That Welcoming Mennonite Churches Google Map layer.  The work is really in just compiling the list and then finding latitude and longitude coordinates for the addresses.  Really, not much work at all.  Sigh.
• Get some other contributors to write.  Don’t you get tired of my voice all the time?
• Do some podcasts or some vcasts.  Ideally with someone else.  This, however, takes effort and coordination, both of which I am sadly lacking.
• Get a group of Mennonite bloggers together at a MCUSA conference and kick some internet ass!
• A cool logo so I can put it on a T-shirt or turn it into a tattoo.

All about the content:

• Most popular posts as of this moment in time: Either other urban Mennonites love themselves some manflesh or I hit the right keyword combination to make these appear high on Google results.  Anderson Cooper used to be on top until the Brad Pitt post and now he’s underneath Brad — which is right where he wants to be (bada bing!).
• Posts I had the most fun writing: The live-blogging of the debates.  They were way more interesting because I was blogging them. Seriously, I don’t think I could have gotten through them without this site.
• Post I am most proud of: Where have all the Mennonites gone?  It’s my most sincere post I think.  Because I really am asking MC USA and because I think we should try to get an answer.
• Post with the most interesting comments:  The head covering posts are getting some interesting feedback.  Which is the purpose of these blog thingies, right?  The interesting conversations.  Right?
• The post I wish I had written: The week that George Tiller was murdered, the Daily Dish began running an interesting series of reader-provided posts on abortion — mostly personal stories — some for, some against, some neutral.  That same week, whether purposefully or by a very weird coincidence, The Mennonite took a look at abortion, asking us to reshape the debate, which was good — despite the appalling cover.  I thought had a lot to say but when it came time to write it down, I couldn’t do it.  I don’t know if it’s because I think it’s really hard to be rational on this topic, if I am scared of getting into a debate I don’t want to get into with someone or if, in the end, I really believe that there shouldn’t be a debate at all.  I still wish I had tried.

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