So, today is the last day of March and after this post is published, I will have successfully blogged every day of an entire month.  This marks the first time I have done that ever in the entire nine or so years that I have been blogging.  This also means I have accomplished another one of my goals on my 101 Things list.

The question now is whether I will continue this trend and my answer is most likely no.

This does not mean I’m going to stop blogging.  As a matter of fact, I feel like this has at least given me the motivation to write more here and to be more active with regards to some of my other web endeavors.  But the biggest thing I’ve learned during this entire month is that forcing the writing isn’t really beneficial.

I know I said earlier that posting every day wasn’t a big deal – that if I failed, I failed.  And that remained true pretty much through out the whole month.  The world wasn’t going to end if I just stopped.  But as I crossed over the halfway point and got closer and closer to accomplishing my goal, I wanted to finish.  I didn’t want to quit.  I wanted to at least accomplish what I had set out do.

The problem was, March wasn’t that of an exciting month.  I was very busy with the monotony of my daily life, as usual and that, in my opinion, lead to some rather uninteresting posts.  Sure, now I pretty much have a record of what I did every single day in March – what I watched, what I ate, how shitty or awesome work was that day.  Where I went, when I went places besides work.  But that’s pretty much it.  There were no profound thoughts or interesting anecdotes coming out onto the blog because I didn’t really have any.

So there was quantity, just not quality, in my opinion.

I think my problem sometimes is that my brain moves fifty-million miles a minute.  I’m internally multi-tasking twenty-four hours a day.  In the morning, I’m thinking about what I have to do that afternoon.  In the afternoon, I’m thinking about the evening and what’s awaiting me at home.  If a thought, an idea, a musing sneaks it’s way in there, I never take the time to stop and write it down and expand on it.  And by the time I’ve sat down to write, it’s gone.

This entire month has made me realize that’s what I need to do: take some time each day to develop my thoughts better.

I also think I need to lock the security down a bit tighter, or at least utilize the security available to me.  I absolutely miss being able to post about whatever I want and what is bothering me without offending someone or reprecussions from some off-color rant that I might have made when I’m angry or upset or bothered.  There is also sometimes when I want to rant about my job but knowing the history of some of the more popular bloggers, I know better than doing THAT in a public forum, aside from the fact that there is some anonymity and sensitivity I still want to retain with regards to my job and what I do there.

People have asked me numerous times why I do this – why I put my thoughts and opinions out there in a public forum and truth be told, there’s a lot of reasons.  I love the feedback, the community, the record-keeping in general.  Writing about things (and talking, but there is very few people in my life who will listen to me talk for as long as I can talk) has always been catharthic for me.  Truthfully, the audience here has never been large and it probably has waned over the past few years as I got busier and busier and had less free time to devote to this place, but I’ve continued on because it is sort of a sanctuary, a place to escape.  Sure, it’s public, pieces of it at least and I don’t mind that because perhaps there is a day where I really need advice or a sympathetic ear, and that’s usually the day someone comes out of the woodwork.  Or perhaps there is someone out there who is feeling similarly to me or going through the same thing and just need to identify with someone.  And even if they don’t say, generally I can feel ok to just know it’s out there and available for someone to stumble upon if they need it.

That, and I’ll pretty much tell anything to anyone once I get to know you.  No shame – that’s all me!

So basically, to sum it all up, it’s been a long and rather quiet month but there were some good  times.  And because I was able to awesomely complete a goal I sort of set for myself, I now have it all down on a record.  And at some point each day, I’m going to try to take some quiet time and collect some of my thoughts so I don’t bore you guys, and myself, with mundaneity when I actually do sit down to write something.  I mean, I’m not going to be publishing best sellers here but I can be interesting, dammit!

And if not, this site will just be here, waiting for my kids or my grandkids to stumble upon in the future, kind of like finding the old, dusty leather-bound journals in the attic with the slanted shaky handwriting, only this will all categorized and searchable and graphically appealing in 11pt Arial font.

And they’ll know exactly what movies I watched and food I ate for the entire month of March in 2009.

This, my friends, is the stuff they write stories and make documentaries about!