After Two Years

I’ve been blogging for two years now.  For as fast as it goes, two years is a long time to a life.  I mean, a person changes a lot in two years.  I’ve certainly changed a lot.

I like the way my archives stretch down the side of my blog.  When I click on October 2008, I don’t get a clear picture of what my life was like back then, but I get pieces of it and I’m reminded of different things that occupied my mind.  It’s really easy to forget what you thought of something or even just how much you cared about it.  I cared a lot about that damn election.

Blogging is just like grad school where I should have known the minute it first came to my attention that that’s what I would end up doing, but instead I stumbled backwards into it with no direction at all.  No matter how I got here, I’m now in the place it makes most sense for me to be.

I’ve written a lot in the last two years about how blogging changes lives, so I don’t know that I currently have anything new to add on that front, but if I’ve missed anything, it’s just how fun blogging is.  How fun it is to write when writing is what you like to do.  How fun it is to interact with people and how exciting it is to get near-instant feedback on your ideas.  How fun it is to find out how many people feel the same way you do.  How fun it is just to have a whole group of people to complain to on twitter when library patrons are acting up and you’re starting to feel like the Soup Nazi (card ready, no leaning on the desk, walk away as soon as I tell you the due date).

It’s easy to get bogged down by it all, especially the longer you keep going.  There’s the responsibility, the sometimes lack of feedback, the feeling that you’re not like you used to be (because you’ve made up who you used to be), the frustration when words don’t match feelings, and your tendency to make even the most random of thoughts seem so damn serious.  The inevitable lightening comes and you see through all of that silliness not to pure art or pure motivation, but to something that is just as messy as all of life.

And then rainbows and cupcakes to finish, because I went and got serious again.