It’s late.  Almost 4am to be exact.  I’ve been sitting in bed trying to focus on tomorrow’s accounting exam for hours, but I can’t seem to find the right mindset to study a subject that I find to be completely commonsense.  I began to look through my favorites, and on a whim I decided to come back and look at this site I created about a year ago.  I read through the articles that I had devoted so much time and thought into.  I was brought back to the days when I would sit down between classes with a pad of sticky notes and a copy of the New York Times and just reflect on every article, always looking for something worth writing about for my daily blog entry.  It was so exciting to me.  I had this notion that I was spreading knowledge and and opening up minds.  I geared my content towards the reader, hoping to provoke debate or sway people one way or another.  When the readers never came, it seemed as though the time wasn’t worth it.  As I sit here now, reading through all of my writing, I realize that maybe it was worth it.  Through all of that self-inflection, I gained so much more insight into the world around me.  While I was trying to create thought provoking questions for others, I was really forcing myself to think.  It is for this reason that I have decided to restart the College Critic.  This time around I’m going to do things a little bit differently.  Traffic isn’t important to me anymore.  While I still would love to have some readers, the most important thing is that I am happy with my writing.  I learned a lesson when I launched the Swing Voter a few months back.  I was longing for readership so I decided to write a political article. I chose to write about how I admired Mike Gravel for running despite the odds that he faced, but mentioned that I wouldn’t vote for him.  I submitted the article to Digg and Reddit, and within hours the article was at the top of the front page on both sites.  I had almost 10,000 hits in the first day.  You would think that I would be happy with that kind of turnout, and I was - until I saw the feedback.  People decided to leave comments on my site and on reddit that made me feel as if my opinions weren’t worth sharing.  I realized that for the first time, maybe traffic is not a blessing.  I have always considered myself to be thick skinned, but for some reason, that incident brought me crashing down to earth.  I haven’t written since that article. 

Here I am.  I look back at that and I learn from it.  I know that the reason I was so affected by that reaction was because I had my hopes so set on finding people who agreed with me and would praise me.  So now I adapt.  I don’t care if people disagree with me because I write for myself - noone else.  If you don’t like something, tell me, but back it up.  If any of my old readers are still around, I want you to know that even during my absence, I still kept tabs on your blogs.

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