I hadn’t realized how much I take advantage of downtime at work to tap out a few notes on what I want to blog about — until my hand surgery, and then a week of having a consultant on-site at work, and then almost a week of vacation. For two weeks in a row now, I’ve been way behind my 1,000-word-per-week goal — usually, I surpass it by at least 300 words.
There are so many things to write about, too. I got the cyst removed from my hand. I still haven’t properly lambasted Appliance Center for our refrigerator delivery debacle. Connor keeps growing and changing and doing super cute things, like making up dance moves to Do You Realize?? by the Flaming Lips.
It’s just so easy to let Life get in the way. And sometimes there’s no other choice but to let it happen and go with the flow. Sometimes, there’s no time to write because my son refuses to stay in bed, and I refuse to let him potentially trash his room to keep himself awake, so I keep going up and tucking him in (and sometimes yelling at him). Sometimes, my husband is on vacation and I use my hour of grown-up time after our son goes to bed to reconnect with him and just talk (or just listen).
But sometimes, like tonight, I carve out a few minutes to brain dump on my blog, despite having to right the piles of knocked-over papers and other shit by my desk, despite having spent half an hour snipping two giant handfuls of chives from the garden to freeze for later, despite needing to balance my checkbook and pay some bills before bed.
Butt in chair, like any other writer.
I know that the personal blog is a dying medium. I don’t particularly care. I’ve journaled since I was about seven years old, and this is the form my journal takes today. I love being able to go back and search it (unlike my volumes of paper journals) and see quickly when a thing happened and how I felt about it.
That’s why these lapses in writing are so important for me to avoid. I hate going back in my journals and diaries to what I know were important times in my youth or childhood, then realizing that the moments had been so hectic that I never sat down and wrote about them at the time.
Blogging isn’t THE most important thing. Not by far. But it is important to me.