I knew it had been awhile since my last post, but when I was asked the other day why I hadn’t been posting, I realized that it’s now been over a month since the last post. I haven’t posted due to a personal dilemma — I got myself kind of backed into a corner by a couple of things. One was my idea to post all of the paintings I did last semester. This became a bit of an issue for me because the final project we did was an assignment to get “out of the comfort zone.” After a couple of false starts, I ended up doing a political series because for me, that was about as far out of my comfort zone as I could get.

Now the problem: when I started this blog, I had a resolve that there were a couple of themes that I was not going to talk about, no how, no way. These were politics, religion, pets, and recipes. So therein lies the dilemma. I have some very passionate feelings about politics, but I’m not the kind of person who deals well with conflict. So unless I’m talking to someone I know for sure feels the same way I do about a particular issue, I pretty much keep these thoughts to myself in the interest of peace and harmony. I still can’t decide about posting this particular part of myself, but I will say that recent events have pretty much rendered my series irrelevant — so it’s probably pointless.

My other issue has to do with some soul searching about the whole idea of blogging in general. I used to read a lot of blogs fairly regularly, but the number of things I’m interested in causes me to go off on tangents of web meanderings that lead off in so many different directions that I find myself becoming disoriented. Maybe I get really excited because I think I’ve found some fabulous nuggets of insight or inspiration that give me totally new ideas I can use in my work, but if I don’t stop right that minute, I keep going until I lose sight of why I sat down at the computer in the first place, getting tangled in the forest of windows I’ve opened up, until I’ve wasted so much time that I feel depressed and demoralized. Rather than being inspirational, it becomes completely counter-productive because I get nothing done.

Back to the idea of blogging. I have to ask myself why I’m doing it. I think I started it because several people I knew were telling me I should do it. You can get your name out there, and it can be a great marketing tool. Also, I had started doing some private journaling at the time, and it occurred to me that maybe I should just do it as a blog. But my rather private nature means that the two things wouldn’t ever have the possibility of serving the same function. Maybe part of the appeal of blogging is the challenge of forcing myself to write, which, as with any kind of practice, makes one better at that particular thing. Maybe my motivation to blog is because everybody else is doing it, and I sure as heck don’t want to be left out. (But that’s precisely the wrong reason, isn’t it?)

I read a statistic a couple of weeks ago about how many new blogs are started every day (but of course didn’t keep track of where that came from), and it’s a mind-boggling number. What are all these people writing about? Are we all just creating a huge pile of useless bits that takes more and more storage space and electricity and creates CO² emissions and eventually destroys the planet? Am I doing anything of value to anyone, or am I just joining in with more self-absorbed navel-gazing? And now it’s not enough to just blog (when did that become a verb?) but I must also “tweet,” and I am just nobody at all if I’m not on Facebook and LinkedIn and have lots and lots of “friends.”

Well, enough of that. Sorry to be so negative. I promise to be happier next time!