A Mission Statement of Sorts

This scene, from Arrested Development, is one of my favorites:

Michael: Speaking of which, where's your child?
Lindsay and Tobias: [laughing] We don't have a child, Michael! [suddenly serious] Oh.
Lindsay: Did you mean Maeby?
Michael: I did mean Maeby.
Tobias: Well, she’s hardly a child, is she, Michael?!
Lindsay: Yeah, and we know where she is. She’s with her debate club, and they’re on their way to Sacremende for the semifinals.
Narrator: She wasn’t. And a Google search of the word “Sacramende” only came up with this:

I always get a kick out of the idea that Maeby Funke is on her way to Sacremende, not just because it shows up Lindsay and Tobias' terrible parenting skills, but also because of what Sacremende represents: an imagined, untraceable other world where the rest of her life takes place. Nobody in AD is ever really sure where Maeby is. She's constantly ditching school (and getting expelled for it), leaving work at the banana stand early, and living a secret life as a successful film executive. A great deal of her life takes place offscreen--in Sacremende.

This blog is the place where I will make a little bit of my own "offscreen" visible to the world. I'm fortunate to have several trips to distant lands in the coming year, so I'll be making myself scarcer than usual. So Postcards from Sacremende will be just that: updates and dispatches, new things I've found, probably more than a few banal observations and lame pop-culture commentary...from my various travels. This will include comments on restaurants and food, parks and natural adventures, cities and towns, and my research. As the post below suggests, there will probably be some politics thrown in as well, though I'm really going to try to keep it to a minimum. This isn't a political blog, after all; there are plenty of great ones out there already.

So that's what I hope to accomplish with this blog. We'll see how well it goes...