Let me start off by thanking everyone who has sent me birthday greetings. It is greatly appreciated. Birthdays can be a great time of reflection, especially if there are other big events going on, such as moving and trying to find a new job. It can be amplified if the birthday is a milestone or rapidly approaching one. For me, fifty is coming soon. That is well past halfway through the three score years and ten that poets of yesteryear wrote about, so please indulge a little mid life crisis reflections.

After dinner, I will blow out the candles on my birthday cake and make a birthday wish. What shall I wish for? Most practically, I’m wishing for a good job, but I’ve been wishing for that for a while. I’ve had various leads that looked promising, but never panned out.

How would I define a good job? Well, I realize that potential employers may come by and read my blog. I hope my description of my dream job doesn’t put off any of them if their opportunity isn’t precisely what I’m dreaming for. I sometimes feel as if that has happened in the past, and that perhaps I’m too much of a dreamer.

People who know me, and particularly my thoughts about writing know that I like to focus on the larger narrative. Yet I usually don’t think a lot about that narrative when I write my blog posts here. Instead, I’m finding a bit of it in retrospect.

Let me start off going way back. When I was young, I had a speech defect. I’m not sure how much I was ostracized for my funny way of speaking and how much I just felt that way, but I remember kids making fun of the way I spoke, even through high school. In college, I took some courses in speech pathology. I’ve always been searching for my own voice and been interested in helping others find their voices.

I had some poems published when I was in high school and college. I moved to New York City to become a writer. In the meantime, I supported myself working with computers. Now, nearly thirty years later, I still write and support myself by working with computers. Blogs have been a wonderful joining of the two.

When I was working as BlogMaster for John DeStefano’s campaign, I read a lot of local blogs and hyperlocal journalism sites. At the http://www.newhavenindependent.org/ >New Haven Independent, I came across posts by http://www.newhavenindependent.org/archives/gina_coggio/ >Gina Coggio. Gina was teaching English in a school in New Haven. She wrote wonderful accounts of her interaction with students in the school. I visited her class and encouraged them to take up blogging. Many of them had important stories to tell.

Back in September, 2005, I wrote in The New Orleans Metaphor,

It is my dream that just as Freedom Riders hopped on buses over forty years ago to help bring equality to blacks in the south we will see a new generation of people head to the Gulf Coast to help rebuild and help fight poverty.

In my mind, I thought of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”, redone for a new generation and a new media. I thought of bloggers and videobloggers writing about the Gulf Coast of today. I thought of people helping people along the Gulf Coast find their voice to describe their post-Katrina struggles, sort of like http://www.bloggercorps.org/ >BloggerCorps which never really got off the ground.

A month later, Sen. Edwards came to Yale as part of his Opportunity Rocks tour. I spoke about this idea with friends there. In Freedom Riders of the New WPA, I described the event:

If Senator Edwards does the standard leftover politics, I will be disappointed, but not surprised. I sure hope, however, that he will really talk about a new generation of Freedom Riders…

So, when Senator Edwards invoked the image of Robert Kennedy in Appalachia, my friend excitedly said, “That is exactly what you were talking about.” I wondered if this is what I’ve been hoping for.

Later, I was approached by the Edwards campaign about possibly working for them. I had dreams of being able to bring about a little bit of this vision. Perhaps my dreams were too big, perhaps they were looking for something else. Whatever it was, it never worked out for me to work with the Edwards campaign.

This year, on New Years, I wrote some similar thoughts in to help people find their voice. I spoke about it in terms of media reform. I’ve followed various leads for jobs with different non-profit organizations where I hoped I could bring about some of this vision. I spoke with Jay Rosen about trying to find ways to get this vision incorporated into some of his work with NewAssignment.Net.

Now, Sen. Edwards has announced his “Road to One America” Tour. It will start in New Orleans and end up in Prestonsburg, KY, where Robert Kennedy ended his trip in 1968. I hope the campaign has great local people blogging about the trip. More importantly, I hope that they spend some time helping people in New Orleans, and Prestonsburg and the towns and cities in between find their voices online. I hope these voices find their way into hyperlocal journalism, into Off the Bus, and find a persistence in our national dialog that enables politicians and non-profits to address the problem of poverty in our country.

And I do hope that I can find a job where I can help people find their voice.