According to WordPress stats, this blog recently reached 1000 “hits”! Stats, especially WordPress ones, are not always an accurate measure, since there are a bunch of different ways people access WordPress, and that a lot of those numbers come from searches for pictures of One Direction fans; I hope they found the content they were after and then some!

Nevertheless, 1000 is a nice round numerical milestone of sorts so I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone who has followed and read my thoughts over the last several months. Thank you for reading!

Today also marks one year since I started the blog, though I didn’t begin blogging regularly until January of this year due to university studies and a wonderful month-long American holiday in December. My last post on How We Do was the 42nd post of the year so I’ve averaged about one post per week in amongst everything else in my life. Two of my personal favourite posts to write have been for Limitless and Inception. Popular posts have been on the 1948 Bogart classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, A Beautiful Mind, Adam Lambert’s If I Had You, and most recently How We Do.

When I write a post, I may dwell for a couple of days just trying to nail down exactly what distinguishes a movie or song in terms of how this vision of life meshes with my worldview. Sometimes, what I think at the beginning of that process is quite different to the finished published product. That to me is part of the wonder of film and music – how these media can affect you emotionally, and how they can stimulate the intellect in different ways.

This beauty is also one of my biggest challenges – to accurately reflect the content and intent of what is being said or sung, to understand those issues and then engage fairly on those terms, because interacting with any art is ultimately an interaction with another person.  To have our say and to be understood are things I think we all want, and so we should aspire in all our conversations to ask, listen and understand.

Thanks for reading!