Every week for three years I’d watch a movie in theaters and then post a few hundred words on it to a website, my first home on the Internet, CineMe. Initially I was looking for access to the Online Film Critic Society and all the free tickets, free screeners, and derisive laughter entitled to its membership.

Eventually I saddled up with a different group of online film enthusiasts, kept watching, kept writing about some really good movies and some really awful ones.

It got me writing regularly, an essential precursor to writing well. It made me a better storyteller. The effect of all that research and peer-review has insinuated itself into my teaching in some very weird, very cool ways.

Anyway, since starting teaching, since leaving college, I’ve gone from a movie a week to a few a month to very few at all. I don’t review movies. I blog about teaching. The site comes up for renewal this week and I’m cutting her loose.

It’d be easy for me to get nostalgic here, to feel like I’m putting a knife to a fixture of my college years, fall afternoons spent pulling cheap tickets to UC Davis screenings, dodging a class or two in favor of a matinée downtown (by myself, by design), hitting the Mill Valley Film Festival with Michael K., getting positively wrecked by 25th Hour, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, et cetera.

It’d be easy to feel that way but I’m trying not to. Every interval of my life has been hard. Every interval has been great. I find that the more I indulge nostalgia, the more I romanticize what once was, the more cowardly I become making decisions about what could be.

Required Reading:

• Theater Etiquette Manifesto