On Blogging In General

As my two faithful readers have no doubt noticed, I haven’t been posting about my life since mid-December or so. I think this is pretty normal for me; every now and then I get too busy to post, and then I just let it go for a while, not really having the motivation to catch up.

I do feel a little bad about this, because there are several people who I don’t talk to all that much who have told me they enjoy reading my blog every now and then to see what I’m up to.

I think my “privacy pendulum” might be swinging back a bit the other way as well. Clearly, I’m very open about myself on the Internet. I’m easily contactable, and Google knows a lot about me. While I don’t post every little detail of my life (I often make good use of WordPress’ “private post” feature), it’s usually easy to get a pretty good impression of what I do during the week, on the weekend, etc. While I’m not uncomfortable with this, I really do just write that stuff for myself. There’s little to no exhibitionism component to it. It’s more like a private journal that I don’t mind other people reading (well, except for the actual private/personal things). I do frequently go back into my archives just to see what I was up to at a particular time. I’m often very interested in how my life changes, and how the things that constitute a “normal week” for me change over time.

On a side note, I’ve also started thinking a bit about the other people in my life. While I don’t reveal any intimate personal details about my friends, they do figure prominently in my life, and I write about the things I do with them, usually giving names and places and whatnot. Again, this makes perfect sense if you think of this as my personal journal that just happens to be readable by anyone: why would I censor myself? But still, some of my friends in particular might feel a bit uncomfortable about being mentioned so publicly by name. It’s a bit late at this point to invent pseudonyms or just use first initials; anyone who has read my blog for a while would easily know who I’m talking about. And besides, I don’t want to do that for my own sake: I’d have to decipher the names or initials later when I go back and read them, and I don’t want to do that.

There’s also another annoyance from my perspective: sometimes when I’m writing about public stuff, there are sections of private material that I want to add in there. Invariably, I end up making a separate private entry, but that’s a pain and doesn’t really fit the flow of my writing very well.

So, I probably won’t be posting about day-to-day stuff all that much anymore, unless it’s unusual or interesting. I’ll reserve that for private posts when I feel like doing them. If you want to know what’s going on with me, ask! Email, IM, or – god forbid – call me. Those of you who are likely to want to do so already have my various forms of contact info.