Blogging From My Mom’s Basement

I have a working blog again!  At least, I think I do (this post is a test).  My blog has been kind of broken for the last several months and nearly every change I made would send the whole thing crashing. I have no idea what the problem was, but over the last couple days I have been moving my sites over to a new hosting account.  I was not prepared for how happy it would make me to have a fully-functioning blog again.

I flirted with the idea of a redesign.  It would be my first in pretty much ever, which is weird for a person who rearranges all of her furniture as often as possible.  But I just made a few changes to simplify things even further and I was satisfied.  So to the people on twitter who freaked out at the idea: have no fear and thanks for caring.  This sounds rather pretentious, but I realized that what I cared about most was people reading my writing, so I gave up trying to direct everyone to everything else I do on the internet and just gave myself plenty of room to write.

Some of my pictures were lost in the move, so I’ve been going through the archives trying to replace them.  I was actually a bit hesitant at first, because uhhhh, I don’t really want to revisit some of my posts.  It’s like being forced to read old emails.  But it’s been fine and I’m just hoping no one saw me in the library scanning through a bunch of pictures of myself trying to find those that belong on my blog.  You try looking through all of your photos on Photobooth without feeling a little embarrassed.

There was a lot of conversation around the internet several months ago about how blogging is no longer what it used to be, and I didn’t really join in because I didn’t feel that way.  To me, blogging is like just about everything else where it’s what you make of it.  Of course it’s not going to be the same if you stop participating.  But just very lately, I have had some pangs of nostalgia for when we all used to blog and it was all so exciting.  Most of the best people I’ve met through the internet don’t blog at all anymore.  I’m pretty content to just keep doing my thing over here by myself, but I get it now.  Things have changed.

I think I personally covered about a year’s worth of feelings about blogging in only the last few days.  For a while, I’ve had the urge to write and post everything, and I have been doing that and not understanding how people can confine themselves to so few posts.  Then I wimped out of posting something that made me nervous and instead made the decision to work on other things this week and not blog as much.  It only took me a couple days to think, “it’s so much easier not to write about your feelings all over the internet.  I could totally do this.”  Then I took my broken blog and destroyed it completely before putting it back together, and once it was alive again, I thought, “I could never give this up.”

I like the thought of having an idea and implementing it immediately, but despite my impatience, I notice that more often I get an idea and then think about it for a while and then talk about it for a while and then slowly it comes to life in a way so lacking in drama that I don’t even notice I’ve done anything.  So I said I was going to write a book of essays and then a friend asked how it was going and I had to admit that I had been so busy writing for my blog that I hadn’t even started yet.  Of course, I was actually kind of avoiding it too, which puts it at the bottom of a huge list of things I’ve used blogging as an excuse to avoid.  But then I was struck with a clearer idea of what I want to do, and now I’m excited to get writing.

What I’m getting at is actually nothing, but what I’m thinking is that I have to blog less and put more energy into other writing.  After my experiences this week, I’m not sure if this will be easy or difficult for me.  I also wasn’t sure if I wanted to mention any of this, but what’s the point in having a blog if you’re not going to share more information about yourself than anyone could possibly be interested in?  Exactly.  Sometimes it’s important to maintain blog stereotypes.  Now excuse me while I put my pajamas on and head down to my mom’s basement.