December 21, 2009

A HARBINGER

In order to give you enough time to change your bookmarks, I am announcing now that I am not renewing my tryingtogrok.com domain for 2010.  The old site will still be at tryingtogrok.mu.nu and this one is at tryingtogrok.new.mu.nu.  I have given up on getting Pixy to help me redirect the site, and am letting it lapse.  That gives you readers until the beginning of January to change your links or bookmarks.

And it may portend a bigger change down the road.

I started blogging six years ago, when I was feeling very alone and alienated from my college friend group.  I needed an outlet to speak my own mind and work through what I believed.  I needed somewhere to cash those chips.  Along the way, I met many wonderful people who shared my worldview, or at least enough of it that we had common ground.  My Real Life and my Blog Life started to blend and then tip, and now I'm at the point where I have a mere handful of real life friends and the majority of my connections are with other bloggers or readers.

And I am happy and fulfilled.

And now my blog just doesn't serve as the outlet I once needed it for.  If I want to gripe about taxes or guns or health care, I can pick up the phone and call my blog friends.  Or I can bang out an email to the person I think will grok.  I am no longer alone, and I no longer feel the driving urge to add my two cents to the news, at least not like I did back in 2003.

Being on the internet is my #1 hobby.  I spend more time here than I do knitting each day.  And while I loathe when people act like having a baby will never again allow them to have a moment to themselves, I am not naive enough to think that once I have a newborn in the house, my hobby time won't be drastically reduced.  And frankly, I can't see myself devoting an hour and a half to writing a blog post about Afghanistan, especially not when it only garners two comments from readers.  I feel like I will get more satisfaction out of using that time to call a friend and talk about it instead.  Or just reading to keep up on current events, instead of writing.  Blogging has begun to feel very one-sided to me in recent months, like I'm shouting into a canyon, and it's just probably not going to be at the top of my hobby list anymore.

I also have become increasingly self-aware that I am, as Mary Katharine Ham once said, trying to "avoid being crushed under the weight of [my] own narcissism, banality, and plain old stupidity."  The more time I invest in writing posts and get no or little feedback, the more jaded I become.  And I don't like feeling like my banal little opinions and ideas are worth anyone else's time.  To me, there's nothing more embarrassing than writing a long and time-consuming blog post that I think will set the internet on fire, only to have it sit there with no comments at all.  Except, of course, the embarrassment of realizing that I have put myself on this pedestal where I expect people to actually care what my opinions are. 

It is a narcissistic hobby, and I don't like the person I am when I inwardly grouse that my post on foreign policy obviously deserves more comments than that other blogger's post on her weekend trip to the beach.

I'm starting to feel that I've gotten all the good things out of blogging already and that all that's left for me is the narcissism and crushing banality.

But I hate when bloggers just drift away.  If I'm in, I'm in, and if I'm out, there will be fanfare and a set date and you'll know it.  And I would be out for good, not letting the site sit here so I can randomly post every few months.  I am not making any decisions today, just letting you know that I feel like blogging is bringing me diminishing returns.  And that I am considering ending my run here on this site after baby arrives, for a variety of reasons.

Posted by: Sarah at 09:09 AM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
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