Metablognition

When I was a kid, I would go for spurts of faithful journal writing. And then there would be a break. A few days, a few weeks, a few months. I didn't really matter how long-- I always felt guilty. Like I'd abandoned my journal. Like maybe it would need therapy to cope with its abandonment issues. So I'd always begin my return entries with a lengthy apology for the length of time it had been since I had written. As though my journal gave a damn.*

I feel compelled to do the same here, though in this context I suppose it makes a little more sense, as there are a few real, live human beings out there who read my blog. Or at least, who used to read my blog. Until I betrayed and abandoned them with my slow, infrequent posting habits. Which means that, while I am ready to break my long internet silence, I can't bring myself to just....start posting again, as though no lengthy absence had occurred. That would be like calling up someone you'd totally blown off for several weeks and expecting them to hang out again without some sort of explanation.

So, um, explanation.

I've been tired, mostly. My days go something like this: wake up at an unreasonably early hour with the children, make breakfast, get ready for work, take care of children, go to work. Work, come home, cook/eat dinner, cajole the children into bed, go for a run, pick up the house, chat with the husband, brush my teeth, wash my face, collapse into bed. If I'm reading something that's completely engaging, I might pick up a book between "wash my face" and "collapse into bed," or maybe Abe will connive me into watching three back-to-back episodes of The Mentalist. And then I'll get all excited about the novelty of doing something I want to do and end up staying up way too late and then be miserable and hypersensitive the next day. So when I'm choosing fun things to do in the fifteen minute slot between "wash my face" and "collapse into bed," I might think about blogging, but the thought of going through all the steps necessary to even get started (opening up the laptop, waiting for it to turn on, opening up the internet browser, going to blogger, logging onto blogger, creating a new post, and then stringing words together into cogent sentences.....good heavens, the toil! the travail!) just makes me tired.

And then I spiral into a doom cycle of insecurity: if I let myself go long periods of time without writing, I start thinking I have nothing to write about, and that if I did write about something, people would think it was boring/offensive/poorly written/too positive/too negative/too religious/too non-religious and then--please, no!--they might stop reading my blog. Not that they've been reading it anyway, as I haven't been posting. But such is the way of my irrational mind. Which means that I'm past due for a little reminder to myself that it's my blog, dang it all, and I'll post whatever I rootin' tootin' dang well please. And ya'll can take it or leave it. So there.

The truth is, though, that just getting on to participate in a little metablognition (blogging about blogging) has been enlivening for my inner writer, so much so that I think I might go through all the effort of turning on the laptop to do it again tomorrow.

We shall see.

*I've got this anthropomorphism problem. It gets so bad sometimes that I won't pick up a bottle of shampoo at the store unless I'm sure I want to buy it because I don't want it to gets its little hopes all lathered up just to put it back on the shelf. Once Abe decided it was time to throw away the microwave my parents let us have when we got married (a microwave that, mind you, had been in my family for years) and I cried hot, bitter tears because it broke my heart to think that all the microwave's years of loyal, faithful service would end in the cold solitude in a landfill somewhere far away.