the onda

Back in the day (2002), my first blog was called "Musings of a Story-Telling Animal." This was in homage to a Graham Swift novel called Waterland that has good some good ideas, is thick as the phone book to get through, and has this absolutely wonderful passage about stories:

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man-- let me offer you a definition-- is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall-- or when he's about to drown-- he sees, passing before him, the story of his whole life.

At the time, this passage was what blogs most reminded of-- an opportunity for people to tell stories which would define them in a context which they could then use to work, play, keep in touch, and most importantly, relate to each other.

Three years later, my thinking has evolved. Yes, blogs are absolutely about all of the things I mention above, mainly bringing people together in the context of their own stories. But, at least in my day-to-day, they have also become a critical tool for getting inside other people's heads-- getting "on their frequency" so to speak.

Hence, name 2.0: Onda. It's not the South American cousin to the hyper-efficient cars we've come to know and love, but the Spanish word for wave or frequency. In fact, there is an idiomatic expression in Spanish: "Estas en Onda?" which is means something like: "Do you get it?"

So Blog 2.0 is about the things that I "get" thanks to the work of the ~150 other people whose ideas I get to see via RSS on a pretty regular basis. As a final note and in derenfece to the theme of the year, I was reintroduced to the word Onda by one of the great remixers of our time in his recent song Que Onda Guero?

What I dug the most about the song is that I'm pretty sure the expression itself did not originate in any Spanish-speaking country but has instead been remixed into some English-Spanish hybrid by the many Mexicans, Guatemalans, and other South/Central Americans living in southern California.

So welcome to my onda.