Candidly Speaking - 23/02/22

I am using the dd/mm/yy format, because it is more familiar to me.

I am going to start a weekly blog on this Substack, where I post weekly episodes of my music podcast, Musically Speaking. It is going to be either an experiment I will quickly come to regret, or a source of fleeting joy in a dreary week.

I was 14 or 15 when I started acknowledging that I had A Lot to share, and not many people to share it with. My interests are unusual, my politics fail to make me popular in college, and I have, simultaneously, an yearning to be alone as well as with company. My name is Chuong Nguyen, and please let me pay for coffee.

I attempted to create a daily journal (some people would call a ‘diary’) during my most insecure teenage years. It failed to take off, probably because I was lazy, or because some days were just not worth sharing.

I have been listening to the audio book version of Andrew Sullivan’s “Out on a Limb”, his collection of essays from 1989 to 2021. I loved some of them, and hated others, and resonated with one particular piece “Why I Blog”. There is no doubt that Sullivan is one of the greatest political opinionists of the past 30 years. Anyone fed up with the excesses of the Right as well as the Left should find comfort his calm, rational, and compassionate writing. Following his works over the years has made me a better Conservative, as well as a better Catholic (more on that in later blog entries).

In short, I was inspired by his essay to start blogging. I decided to make it fun for myself by logging an entry once a week, but releasing it on any given day of the week. I hope reading these ramblings is as much fun for you as for me typing them out.

See you next week!