ChrisTheBear and I exchanged a couple of e-mails last week, and in the course of things, he asked me: “Will you be joining the ranks of law school blogs when you start, or will you keep it general-interest? The law student blogosphere is a wonderful community with its own stars, but it’s sadly incestuous.”

Now, the normal reaction to such a question would be to think it over internally and then respond via e-mail with a simple yes or no. But this is me we’re talking about, and heaven knows I can’t resist an opportunity for a bit of public navel-gazing about the future of my website. :) So, here goes.

I’ve actually thought about this question quite a bit, and although I can’t answer it with 100% certainty — my blog has a way of evolving on its own in ways that I can’t necessarily anticipate — my tentative answer is no, I will not be joining the ranks of law school blogs, per se. Obviously, I’ll undoubtedly have plenty to say about my law-school experience, and I’m sure more and more legal issues, both directly and indirectly related to my classes, will show up as topics of blog-posting as time goes on. But overall, I intend to keep the blog general-interest.

There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, I have a lot of divergent interests, and my blog gives me the opportunity to gab incessently about them in a forum where people might actually pay attention, and sometimes even respond. As Kristy has insightfully noted, my blog goes through “Many Seasons of Brendan” — college-football season, election season, hurricane season, and so forth. That’s just how I am: I ping-pong from one obsession to the next, always have, always will. And my blog is inevitably going to reflect what I’m thinking about and talking about at any given point in time. (As Diane Huffman said, “It’s a dream come true for someone with ADD.”) So it is pretty much impossible to imagine, for example, that during March of my second semester of law school, I won’t post extensively about the NCAA Tournament. There’s just no way.

Secondly, I enjoy having a general-interest blog, and I think my readers do, too. I’ve built up a decently large following — more even than the comment section suggests, as I am constantly reminded when I run into friends, relatives and distant acquaintances who say they look at my blog at least once a week — and I don’t want to lose that following by steering my blog away from a general discussion of my life and all my interests, and into something that only a small fraction of my readers can directly relate to. This is a major difference between Chris’s blog and mine: he began blogging at roughly the same time he started law school, whereas my blog will be almost 2 1/2 years old by the time I start. So it was only natural that his would morph quickly into a law-school blog, with his primary audience being law students and Baylorites. But for me, that would be a sudden departure from a well-established history.

Thirdly, as much as I will be immersed in the law next year — and as much as my time to pay attention to other things will be reduced — I suspect that I will want more than ever to use at least some of my scarce free time to think and write about things other than law. As they say, all work and no play makes the Irishman a dull Trojan. Or something like that.

Finally, there’s the issue of distance. Strange though it may seem to say this about a website that bears my first and last name, I do like to maintain a certain distance between my blog and the ongoing events of my life. I blog about certain types of things and not others. I don’t give daily rundowns on the state of my relationship with Becky, for example, and I don’t post about my job and its office politics or anything like that. I do this consciously, because getting too personal and detailed can get you in all sorts of trouble with the people in your life. Law-school blogs can present this sort of dilemma, as Chris noted in a post a while back about his newfound quasi-celebrity status (”oh, you’re the one with the website”) at Baylor. If you post extensively about what’s happening in class each day, you risk offending professors, fellow students, etc., with your interpretation of events. It may become necessary to tread lightly on certain topics. And since I have the philosophy that if you’re going to do something, you ought to do it right, I wouldn’t want to bill my site as a law-school blog but then feel obligated to steer clear of reporting all the interesting law-school gossip for fear of offending people! (For the record, I think Chris does a great job of walking this tight-rope. I just don’t particularly want to deal with it myself.) So I prefer to keep it general interest, and post about school-related stuff as I see fit, but not feel obligated to give a running summary of the Notre Dame Law School 1L Experience.

Of course, there will inevitably be some changes to my blog once law school begins. First and foremost, I’m sure I will be updating it quite a bit less frequently, out of sheer necessity. (This is going to be tough, since the November election is barely two months after I start, but I will have to restrain myself somehow in order to get my damn work done.) Also, although I’ll still be rooting like hell for the Trojans, the USC-related postings may take something of a hit, in order to avoid totally alienating Trojan-hating Domers. :) And like I said, law-related and law-school-related topics will definitely sneak in there, perhaps quite a lot. I just don’t intend to change the mission statement of the blog (not that my blog actually has a mission statement, but you know what I mean).

Well, that about wraps it up. This has been today’s edition Brendan’s Navel-Gazing News That Nobody Really Cares About. If you made it all the way to the end of this post, congratulations, you win a gold star. That’s gold like the golden dome. [This is the part where I duck as my fellow Trojans throw things at me.]