I know I have been awfully quiet as of late. I'm not even sure if anyone reads anymore. I never lost my desire to write, I just find it hard to let it all spew out when this site is so publicly known (not famous per se but known to friends and family in real life). Plus, as I get older and take on more normal grown up responsibilities, I find it so hard to carve out some time to write.
Read MoreHoly crap on a cracker, there’s a blog here? Something I can write in every day if I’d like? Pffft, who knew? Apparently not me since it’s been close to a month and a half since my last update. I feel like this is confession …
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been <too many to count> days since I have blogged …
(Look at me trying to act like I’m Catholic. The closest I come is that I was baptized. I tried to ask Steve because he did all of that good Catholic child stuff up until high school and then he quit. Which, apparently it’s like a job that you can just stop. They even have a colloquial name for it … lapsed Catholic, which basically means you don’t give enough of a shit to care about the rituals and traditions anymore.) But I digress, because I didn’t disappear for a month and a half to talk about religion. I would just look like an idiot (and probably offend what little readers I have left) if I tried.
But no seriously, I know, I’m bad, I’m awful at this. I just can’t force myself to give up on it. Actually, these past few months, there has been more I wanted to write about than in the past few years. My problem is that I’m such a damn perfectionist that I’m not good at snippets and I haven’t figured out how to let go of the ideal of a complete and concise blog entry, one that has a beginning, middle and end and tells a story and makes a point. Or something like that. So instead of trying, I just don’t do it and then it gets daunting when I do try it because there is JUST.SO.MUCH and I’m writing four or five pages worth of crap that makes no sense because it’s all thrown together and one long rambling mess of I did this and went here and tried this and etcetera and so on.
And the days, they just disappear. I keep telling people the older I get, the faster time seems to go. One minute its January and then I turn around and the holidays are staring me in the face. I’m closer to thirty than I like, all my siblings and cousins are growing up, all my parents and and grandparents are getting older. Time moves so fast that it’s hard to get a grasp on it. Even these past few weeks, we’ve been making plans for the holidays and other stuff and it’s like oh, we have three weeks, no, wait, two weeks, holy shit, it’s just days away.
And of course, it flies when you’re having fun!
One thing has changed that has consumed a lot of my time these past few months: me. In a sense that I stopped being so lazy and started making a point to give myself a routine that worked. One that allowed me to be more organized and to effectively accomplish the tasks that needed to get done in a timely manner. I don’t know how it started or what forced the change but basically, at some point a few weeks ago, I realized we had A LOT of things coming up this holiday season and I need to budget them into my finances as well as my time.
I made up cleaning lists, ones that allowed me to do one area of the house in about half-an-hour each day during the week (my weekly list) and ones that forced me to take care of daily chores that made the weekly ones easier (my daily list).
That change alone really revamped how I spent my time. No longer would I come home and mindlessly veg out on the couch, playing pointless games on the laptop or watching TV (it could be argued that I never posted or did tasks during that time either and that’s correct because even when I was “vegging” out, I was so exhausted that I didn’t do anything on the computer that required me to think). Instead, I started coming home, cooking (or finishing) dinner, doing my daily chores and whatever room that needed to be cleaned that evening, watching whatever shows came on that night, then bed.
Of course, this freed up time on the weekends and I spent that free time, plus whatever I had during the week, doing productive things, things that needed to be taken care of. Paying bills, returning emails from family and friends, working on some business related stuff. We also spent more time with friends and I didn’t have to feel guilty about it.
Because we’ve been trying to cut down on expenses here, I spend a lot of time “managing” the house to be more efficient financially. Budgeting in events and meals so that we can buy only groceries that we need and will use.
I’ve just been more organized and more active and more productive and unfortunately, that means some of my hobbies have suffered more than ever. But I’m working towards a balance and have been doing quite a few things in my Internet life on the back end. So eventually, I think this is going to get me to a place where I can have life in order, both online and off!
Coming soon are the monthly love posts for September and October, because I am that behind!
I have a problem. I’m a perfectionist. I’m fickle. I’m impatient. I’m determined. I’m easily overwhelmed. I have a brain that seems to move faster than I can speak. I’m lazy. Lazy enough not to follow through with writing down all of the seemingly amazing things (amazing to me, at least) that my brain throws at me. Lazy enough to start new hobbies and never finish them because they aren’t perfect. Lazy enough to think of five million great things to blog about during the day but never put them into fruition because I’m too lazy to form them into a coherent and relevant entry and too much of a perfectionist to just post them in a random stream of consciousness.
Can you tell I’m trying something new?
I’ve been trying to get myself back into a rhythm of writing here. Or somewhere. And I’m not sure of the best way to do it. I’m still not sure if this is the right way. But you gotta start somewhere.
I’m not even sure if there’s a point to this entry except to work through some ideas.
This site has been around for nine years this summer. That’s a lot of time. A lot of thoughts. A lot of words. Most of the old entries have been pulled from the public eye but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t available in the Internet archive.
(I didn’t pull them so they couldn’t be read – I just needed a fresh slate everytime I deleted them. Kind of like a fresh notebook beckoning you to fill it up. That first blank page holds so many promises.)
There’s something to be said about longevity, especially on the Internet. Sites are fleeting and it’s rare that I find people who have stuck around as long as me. Most of the group I used to follow back when I was twenty and in college is gone now and have been replaced by a different group. Different people, different thoughts, different backgrounds – but ultimately, we are all the same because we have made the same decision to share our personal lives with the Internet.
Ultimately, the problem with longevity is the exposure. I’ve been at the same place, the same little corner of the web, for nine years. Nine years ago, having a website wasn’t common. Sure, anyone could have one but it wasn’t mainstream. The term and idea of a “blog” was just becoming “trendy” (hence why I hopped on that bandwagon!) and I found it a nice cathartic release for working through the daily issues that I experienced and finding those who were in similar situations and sharing similar circumstances. And I could do it quietly because no one in my personal life would think to search for a website or would bother to “google” it when I made an off-the-cuff remark about my online journal.
I chose to share my life in a public forum so I find it almost hypocritical at times to complain about the lack of privacy. And it’s not neccessarily privacy I’m looking for on the Internet because that would be a silly concept. I guess it’s more that I long for the freedom of days past. Of when no one I knew in my personal life read my site or even knew it existed. Friends, family, coworkers – none of them really knew about my site. So I could kind of write what I pleased in a public forum with a bit of anonymity. I could bitch about work, I could complain about my crazy family, I could lament about my relationship and I could do it all to people I had never met before and not worry about insulting them or whether they were going to run and tell the person I was talking about. They were unbiased, they offered advice freely, they cared. This was before the Internet got mean.
But meanness was never even an issue for me. I am thankful that as the Internet and blogging community evolved I stayed unpopular enough to avoid the crazies. I read some of the stuff the more prominent bloggers deal with and I am thankful everyday that my reach never extended too far beyond my little corner.
The issue was the exposure, as I said above. Now I find myself not even wanting to write because everything that is bothering me, everything that makes me a real person, everything that I want to share, that I want to put into words just so I can get it out and make it go away already! clams up inside of me because I don’t want it to be read by anyone but people I don’t know.
It sounds crazy, I know. It’s the Internet, I know.
Just don’t write things you wouldn’t say in person. That’s easier said than done. There’s a lot I can’t say in person. There’s a lot of things I try to deal with in my daily life that I can’t say to people because of stupid repercussions. Because they’ll be mad or hurt or upset or just throw a fit about it.
Okay, well write them in a personal journal, offline, privately. Doable, but part of the reason I like to write online is the feedback I do get from online friends. Those that don’t judge and if they do, who cares because they’re online and I don’t have to see or hang out with them everyday. I try to talk to certain people about other aspects of my life but there’s such polarizing opinions that it’s difficult to even have a listening ear, someone who doesn’t have their own opinion into things. This person thinks that person is unreasonable and that I should just tell them to ‘F-off!’. This other person think everyone else, including the last person, is wrong. There’s few people in real life who just sit and listen objectively and help me work through decisions based on what they think is best for me and not what they feel personally about the situation and the people involved in it.
It’s difficult, to say the least. I’ve even considered therapy but I’m afraid that’s one step closer to being crazy.
Plus, I can’t really afford the deductible and I’ve got enough physically wrong with me at this point that I think adding mental issues would just be the icing on the cake.
I’ve considered private entries on WordPress here but haven’t really found a private system that still will allow me to promote to the users I want. I would like something that notifies followes when an entry is posted so those who are registered can know to go log in. I would ideally like something posted to my RSS feed that says a new private entry is available, go log in. But I don’t think that’s possible, especially considering the whole concept of RSS promotes the idea of publically available information.
I’ve used other sites, like Livejournal, to blog only my most private stuff and that works in a pinch but I hate managing two sites and the private groups over there.
Lastly, I’ve considered closing Kallure and moving somewhere else. But then I would have to start all over again. I want it to be publically available and I want most of my longtime followers to still be able to follow me but at the same time, I don’t want to share my new location with my personal life.
I’m lost now. I just don’t know how to mesh everything. I don’t know how to use these tools effectively anymore.
It is the reason I don’t write much anymore. I know what I want to talk about. There’s a slew of thoughts running through my head on a daily basis of what I can write about. I just don’t know how. I don’t know the best way to write for the masses, for the public and the personal.
I don’t know how to make everyone happy.
Maybe my problem is the fact that I’m trying to do exactly that.
Maybe that’s why I have so many problems in the first place.
How do I teach myself to embrace the idea that I can’t make everyone happy, online or off?
(I hate feeling as if I have hurt people’s feelings. I hate the idea that someone is angry at me. I hate knowing that my words or thoughts or opinions have somehow affected the happiness or mood of others.)
I don’t know how to change that. And in the process, I don’t know how to make myself happy.
Maybe I do need to see that therapist.
