In Depth: Chris at Ramblings of a Hopeless Khowaga

In Depth: Chris at Ramblings of a Hopeless Khowaga

I have an extensive weed garden. I've tried to grow vegetables and herbs and flowers, but it turns out that I'm really good at growing weeds.

I'm not a gamer, but my boyfriend is. We've got 'em all: Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, bla bla bla. I make fun of him constantly for his obsession with having to have the latest video gaming stuff, and then I play them when he's not looking. I'm rather comfortable with this arrangement.

My other passion that wastes lots of money is travel. I'll go anywhere at any time. And I literally mean anywhere. I can not think of a single place I wouldn't go — I'd even go to Iraq or Afghanistan when they get to be a little less bomby. (I am a bit hesitant to travel to places that might result in death. I'm not a big fan of death). The more off the beaten path, the better. If someone wanted to send me to Suriname or Bangladesh or Equatorial Guinea, I'd be there in a second.

Special Skills:
The ones that I can tell you about without causing my partner to die of embarrassment include:

I'm not fluent in a number of languages (two dialects of Arabic, Greek, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, as well as my own "native" English).

I have total recall on an almost limitless number of useless facts at any given time. The more useless the fact, the more likely I am to remember it. I can, for example, tell you off the top of my head that Druk Air is the national airline of Bhutan. I mean, seriously, who the heck needs this kind of information? I can't remember to renew my driver's license, but I can remember that.

Your "type":
"Breathing."

In all seriousness, I'm not sure what my type would be called. I'm attracted to many different types — I'm not particularly into the "twink" scene; I do tend to prefer adult men that look like, well, adult men.

Not that it much matters, since I'm not on the market … (but not dead!). What type is Daniel Craig or Clive Owen? And do you have a phone number for either one of them?

Anything interesting about you your readers don't already know:
I was never a member of the Backstreet Boys. Although I've never explicitly mentioned this before, my more astute readers have probably already figured that out.

Tell us about your blog:
My blog is partly my daily journal, partly a travel log, partly me ranting about politics and foreign policy. I've been known to compose long academic discourses when I'm reacting to something when I think that a larger point is being missed by a lot of people. I've written long reviews about books or films that have really moved me. And then on occasion I make fun of people (politicians, celebrities, etc.) who desperately need to be mocked.

I'm a gay lefty liberal like a lot of other bloggers out there, but I'm also an academic who has studied and lived in a part of the world that's being discussed a lot right now for all of the wrong reasons, and I like to think that maybe I can bring a different perspective about that to the blogsphere. Or maybe I'm just pretentious.

Birth of blog:
This version was started in August 2006. (Much longer explanation follows.)

Intended Audience:
Primarily human beings, although I'm certainly not opposed to having alien readers. I just don't know if they'd find it interesting.

Seriously, though …

My blog resembles my own personality – I dabble a lot in different things that I find interesting. I enjoy diverse subjects and I think that my blog reflects that. I hope to attract an audience of people who enjoy reading about diverse things from a guy who acts like he knows it all.

My blog is definitely not adult oriented … my parents tune in every once in a while! Other than the occasional photo of Daniel Craig in a bathing suit (let me take a moment … ), it's pretty vanilla in that regard. I don't generally post photos of hot guys – even though it might boost the readership – and I just couldn't bring myself to give a blow-by-blow account of my sex life (no pun intended) — I'm sure my partner's probably happy about that, too!

Number of daily visitors:
I've got between 15-20 people subscribed to the feed (on a good day), and usually get between 5 and 10 extra visitors each day.

What or who inspired you to start your blog?
Oh, that's a hard question to answer.

I've always enjoyed reading memoirs and journals. I'm not quite as bad as Zach Braff on "Scrubs," but I do occasionally take a moment when I'm in the midst of an important event and try to notice things around me so that I'll have those extra details when I write it down. Half of the time I don't actually write it down, but it's something I do catch myself doing from time to time.

The precursor to my actual blog was a series of e-mail messages that I composed while I was on a business trip that literally took me around the world in 2003. I wanted to keep a record of where I was, what I was doing, and how I was reacting to it all. When I was an undergraduate, I spent a year studying in Cairo and didn't keep very good record of what I did — something I've regretted every since. Hence, when I was given the itinerary for an amazing trip around the world, I was determined not to make that same mistake again.

I had a laptop with me and wrote out most of those messages on flights here and there, and half of them never actually got sent while I was traveling. When I got home, I posted them along with photos that I'd taken on my personal Webspace at the University and sent the address to some of my friends and family. They forwarded the info on, and almost immediately I went over my allotted bandwidth and started getting nasty messages from the University web minions, so that first attempt didn't last very long.

The next summer, I was accepted into a five week seminar that took place in the eastern Mediterranean. I decided to do something a little more formal and created an actual site on one of those travel journal services where you can post text and photos. At some point, I realized that I could actually acquire my own dedicated Website for a year for what I'd paid for three months worth of access, so that's what I did.

I actually started blogging daily in August of 2006. I wanted to give myself practice writing something that wasn't academic (sometimes I fail in that regard) — having gone through the trouble of setting everything up, I figured I should use it. I've incorporated some of that earlier stuff into the site – I'm not sure if the 2003 material will make it back up online for a variety of reasons.

I've really enjoyed myself so far, and I've enjoyed seeing what others have to say about what I write. It's also become somewhat theraputic, since I can actually say things to my blog that I'm not sure I could say out loud!

If you could sum up your blog in one sentence, what would it be?
The rantings of a cynical gay liberal academic who thinks he knows the way things ought to be, and has probably lived in Texas a little too long for his own mental wellbeing.

If you had unlimited time, budget and staff, how would you change your blog?
I'd get someone to fix the k2/Wordpress 2.1 incompatibility issue I'm having. Then I'd get someone who actually knows what they're doing to re-write the CSS on my photo gallery so that it actually looks like it's on the same Web site as my blog.

Then … I'm not sure. I've long had plans to develop a section that actually offers details of places I've been — where to stay, what to do there, etc. — but that would take more time than I actually have.

I've also wanted to do more with the short write ups on films and books – make them more detailed, include write ups of my faves – but that would also take more time than I have.

I'm very bad at time management – I've been known to start changing things up before I realize that it's going to take far more time to accomplish than I first thought.

How much time a week do you spend on your blog?
Between two and three hours (excluding obsessive checking of usage statistics). More if I'm traveling and using the blog to update folks on what I'm doing, less if it's a normal week and nothing particularly interesting is going on.

How many blogs do you read weekly? What are your top 5 favorite?
Somewhere between ten and fifteen – It depends on what you consider a "blog" – some of the ones I read are news blogs, design blogs, personal blogs, etc.

In no particular order:
Towleroad
This Boy Elroy ( http://thisboyelroy.typepad.com/ )
Aman Yala
The Photoshop Blog ( http://www.photoshopsupport.com/photoshop-blog/index.html )
All Prep and No H

I love Allistair Appleton's blog ("Do Buddhists Watch Telly?") but he never updates it …

Tell us about the future:
After selling my first book for a record seven figure advance, Ray and I have retired to a Greek island where we manage a gay/lesbian/friendly bed-and-breakfast and spend afternoons on the yacht sipping wine and eating figs picked from the garden. And we've employed Daniel Craig and Clive Owen as the poolboy and houseboy, respectively. No, make that interchangeably.

Give us some coming attractions on your blog:
Assuming that I can keep it from self-destructing through my habit of upgrading all the software without checking first for incompatibilities:

If all goes well — and I should know in the next couple of weeks if it has — I'm supposed to be gone on a long trip this summer that should provide some interesting blog fodder.

I still think I'm at my best when I'm on the road in distant parts and have a constant stream of new and different sources of inspiration. That's not to say that I haven't written some things I'm proud of from home, but for me there's nothing quite like sitting in a smoky Internet caf? at three in the morning and writing until my fingers hurt. I'm really looking forward to it.

And eventually, I would like to actually get around to posting some of the details about my travels – where I stayed, where I ate, things you shouldn't miss while you're in town. I don't have an actual timeline on that project, though.

What do you see different in your life 2 years from now?
2 years really isn't that long in the grand scheme of things. I'll be slightly older (though still 29, interestingly enough), wiser, and my goatee will have mysteriously lost its gray hairs that I think are just really light blond ones. I will still be trying to figure out a workout routine that I can actually stick to for more than three weeks. And most importantly, we'll have a new president who will hopefully be smarter than the last one.

But maybe, just maybe, I will have been able to transfer some of my energy for blogging into writing that book I'm convinced is inside of me somewhere. Who knows?