On Blogging and Other Such Things

Blogging used to be rather easy. A year (or so) ago, I lived in Scotland, and every day brought with it some kind of adventure. Before that, I was in graduate school and college and went on all sorts of random adventures and road trips. I took courses and thought deep thoughts and was exposed to all kinds of new and interesting ideas that I, of course, wanted to come back to my computer and write about at the end of the day. In college, you are surrounded by people and are constantly (whether you like it or not) thrust into various social encounters that, for better or worse, provide good fodder for writing, blogging, and the like. Blogging, as I have said, used to be rather easy. It was even easy when I was unemployed, as blogging provided a forum for complaining about my lack of employment (a topic most worthy of complaint, to be sure).

Writing has become somewhat more difficult of late, I have noticed. Taking a look at my blog, I note that I have not updated with any regularity since returning from Scotland last August -

brief sidebar: It has now been over a year since Kellie and I returned from Scotland.  Over a year.  That is simply ridiculous.  In a lot of ways, it feels like it was just the other day that we lived over there.  The last year has been kind of a blur, between new employment and, well, unemployment.  Crazy.

- and, moreover, I have not updated at all, not a word, since May.  An entire summer has passed and I have not had anything interesting to say.  Well, at least nothing blogworthy.  And it's not just that it's so easy to throw a 140 word update up on Facebook or Twitter.  No, the problem, it seems to me, is that when you spend 40 hours of your week at work, 50 hours or so of your week asleep, and the rest of your hours just trying to relax and unwind from all that working and sleeping, what is there really to talk about?  There are not really that many exciting adventures to be had in my cubicle.  And, even if there were, even if there were crazy things happening to me all the time at the office, work is the kind of thing that I'm just not comfortable blogging about.  This is a strange thing for me; after all, I've kept a blog and made public(ish) all sorts of random details of my life since, oh, 2003.  I have talked about classes, friends, enemies, politics, religion, and everything in between.  But, somehow, work is different.  Part of it, of course, is the fear, even with privacy settings, that a rant about work might find its way to one's current and/or future employers.  That is certainly something that is always int he front of my mind as I write things on the Internets, especially as one who has been bitten on the ass in the past by his, shall we say, brutal honesty.  With stakes as high as one's job, it's hard to get enthusiastic about blogging one's job.

Nevertheless, therein lies the quandary: I spend almost all of my time at work, and thus, it is my main source of interesting (well, occasionally) stories.  And, to be sure, there are occasionally stories I would like to share, lest they be forgotten and left behind in the endless day-to-day slog that is the working world.  So, what are the alternative?  Write nothing, and keep these stories to myself, thereby ending the written narrative that I have kept on this blog for Lo, these many long(ish) years?  Go offline into some form of physical journal?  Go anonymous?  I do not know.