So, I had this other blog. It was supposed to chronicle my big adventure of moving from Richmond, VA to Doha, Qatar in 2005. I started it a couple months before I left, posted a smattering of dog photos and personality quiz results, and finally announced that I was off to Qatar! Then I pretty much stopped blogging. I didn’t have Internet access in my house for the first six months I lived in Doha, but that’s not the main reason I stopped. To say the least, the move was overwhelming. I used to adjust to change at a sloth like pace, and moving from RVA to Doha was a major chunk of change. I’ve gotten better at dealing with change, and 5 years of living in this fast-forward, light-speed paced country may have even made me a bit of a change junky, but 5 years ago: sloth. Everything was happening too quickly for me to reflect on so all my posts would have been some version of: aaauuuuuggggghhhhhh! Another issue had to do with privacy. Doha is in many ways like a small town; a little over a million people live in this whole Connecticut sized country. Plus, everyone at my Uni lived in the same compound. Not being able to be anonymous took some getting used to. Now, I like the familiarity and security, the small town-feel of my Uni and of Doha, but back then a blog felt like more public than I could handle.
Why am I back to blogging? I dunno, really. I’ve been circling around it for a long time. I have numerous class blogs, a poetry workshop blog, a couple private blogs for projects I’m working on, and I started a blog for Diode, but never kept up with it. So the blogging impulse is there, and now here I am pecking away…
To blog or not to blog is a question that interests me in general, particularly when it intersects with negotiations between the public and private self. Why do people start/stop blogging? Some blogs are suddenly abandoned, some go from frequent text postings, to sporadic postings with apologies and promises of more frequent postings. Sometimes more frequent posting occurs, but other times the blog goes dormant. Sometimes blogs limp along, text posts give way to photos or link postings. Sometimes the blog is reinvented and the blog is moved to a new site. None of this is criticism, by the way, after all I abandoned a blog just when it had the potential of actually being interesting. How blogs live and die just sort of interests me.
It’s deep summer, 118 degrees, the palm dates are ripening and most everyone is gone. I’m working. I’m dragging an anthology to the finishing line. It’s solitary, difficult work, and though I love this anthology more than anything I have ever worked on I’m sad that every day a little more summer is gone. So maybe I’m here to just whine a little. That’s okay, right?
I like that you are blogging again, and I may join you in the "there's no real excuse why I have not blogged" category. It is just that with all the classes I have been teaching (9) and facebook and wikis and Blackboard, that I had NO urge to blog really. I think with my upcoming move, I may just feel like blogging again as well :)
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