dianaschnuth

I just can’t leave typos alone. Yes, I know one of my own escapes my eagle eye every now and then — but I’m not a huge corporation with a well-paid marketing department.

I’ve been kind of quiet lately, blog-wise, for several reasons.

Mainly, I just haven’t been able to get into it. When I come home from work, I’d really rather just chill in the recliner, check Twitter and Facebook on my iPhone, watch the news and Travel Channel, maybe read a book. Most days, I don’t even turn on my computer in the evenings anymore — and if I do, it’s to do some genealogy work or scan some photos or sync my iPhone or iPod.

Then there’s the fact that I tend to self-censor a lot more heavily than I used to. There are the “nobody really cares about this” subjects, like what I ate for dinner or what I bought online; there are the “I’m not ready to share this” subjects, like major life-altering stuff (which doesn’t come up often, thankfully); then there are the “I should really keep this to myself” subjects, like when I get pissed at someone and really want to vent, or when I play hookey from work (not like I would ever actually do that).

Once I finally come up with a blog-worthy topic, it’s either so in-depth that it would take actual research and writing and editing (see lazy streak, above), or it’s a timely topic that I procrastinate too long over, so it’s no longer relevant by the time I sit down to write it. Long gone are the days of me sitting down at my computer after dinner and basically writing a Dear Diary entry about my day. Also long gone are the days of me working a job that’s so slow and tedious that I can write a blog entry at work, e-mail it to myself, then post it when I get home.

One thing that’s kept me from blogging, too, is Twitter. Topics that once would have taken several hundred words to cover now get covered in 140 characters. No buildup, no lead-in, no drawn-out resolve; just the meat and the meaning, distilled to quasi-poetic brevity.

I also have a physical journal in which I write longhand every night or so, just to clear my mind. It’s quite therapeutic, and helpful for getting stuff out that I can’t (or shouldn’t) share with the entire internet (see self-censorship, above). It’s definitely a help to be able to write down those things that aren’t suitable for public consumption. It was a habit I clung to back in junior high, high school, and most of college. After college, I started blogging, and my physical journaling became sporadic; random notebooks, or text files on my computer, or scraps of paper (usually intended as blog notes for later). It’s about time I started journaling again.

I’m going to try to start blogging a little more regularly, too, but I make no promises.

I tend to approach blogging like I approach speaking: if I don’t have anything to say, I won’t say anything. I’m not going to speak (or write) simply to fill the silence. In some situations, I’ve found that it makes people more inclined to listen when I do have something to say.

Aaron asked me this weekend if I was planning to post to my blog every weekday for just the month of December. I had originally thought I should start in December, but then make it like my Photo Thursday agreement with myself: all year long. Now that I think about it, though, it might be a better idea to just commit to one month of blogging every weekday, then to sit back and see if the content quality matches the quantity. I don’t want to be posting drivel, after all.

It’s not like I don’t have plenty of topics to cover; some topics have been in the queue so long that they’re no longer even relevant. The problem is figuring out when to write. Do I sit down right after my run? After dinner? After chores? At what point will I be finished with my other responsibilities of the day, but still have enough mental capacity to focus on writing? And how do I successfully unplug from my iPhone games, my blogs, my Twitter, long enough to write something coherent?

Writing is a habit and a skill that I’m going to have to redevelop over time. As with all writers, though, Rule #1 is to just get my butt in the chair and start writing.

I’ve kept a diary or journal off and on since I was about seven years old. My first diary had a classically late-’70s/early-’80s red corduroy cover, and my first entry was about how I was “nervice” to get my tonsils out.

As I got a little older, I was allowed to stay up a little past my bedtime if I was writing in my diary; looking back on my journal entries, a lot of them tend to either be typically elementary-school, starting with “Today I…” or a short excuse: “Nothing happened today. Memaw’s watching, though, so I need to write some more…” Very rarely did I manage to record any major life events — mainly because I didn’t recognize their importance at the time, or because I was too busy living it to record it.

In Junior High (and to a degree during High School), most of my journal entries recorded how outcast I felt and how depressed I was. I also recorded the stupid and immature things I did and said, without realizing how stupid and immature they were at the time. All that means that I can barely stand to read my own journals from about 1987 through 1990, with many cringe-worthy entries up through graduation in ’94. And again, when I go hunting for Major Life Events, they’re conspicuously MIA for the most part.

Once I hit college, my journaling was much more… journalistic, I suppose you could say. This event happened on this day, and this was my response, and these are my thoughts about it. Major life events were covered, even if I didn’t realize they were major at the time, because I just wrote every night out of habit.

My private journal shifted to a public blog in late 2002, but my style hadn’t changed yet. I still wrote about daily events and my reactions to those events, without any thought of the public nature of blogging. It wasn’t until a few years later, when the Internet became a much more crowded place and everyone was online, that I realized my blogging topics were occasionally inappropriate (about the time I discovered Dooce®, now that I think about it).

Since the mid-2000’s or so, I’ve been much more guarded about my choice of topics. I no longer write to complain about my job or about certain people by name. In fact, I haven’t been writing much at all. I’m almost reverting back to my early diary days of missing out on documenting major life events in writing, just from failing to journal every day. I post a photo every Thursday, but sometimes that’s the only post (other than tweets) all week.

I don’t need a new year to start a new habit. Starting in December (that’s two days ago), I’m going to post a blog entry every weekday. (I’ll cut myself some slack on weekends.) I don’t want to turn this into a Tumblr-style reblog, though, so I’m going to sit down and write every night, just like I used to. Granted, it was more relaxing and cathartic to write whatever I wanted into a journal as I lay face-down on the bed in my dorm-room, but times have changed… and I’m not writing an entire blog post from my iPhone or our clunky legacy laptop, no matter how much I’d like to blog from bed.