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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
closing up shop
Reasons why this blog is gone:
- I don't have time to keep it up. I am involved in three separate educational endeavors right now -- my own, my children's, and my tutoring student's -- and those preparations alone sap my time and mental energy to the point where I just don't have any left over for blogging. And that doesn't even take into account the time I spend on other things like keeping house, ignoring the laundry, cleaning up puppy messes, playing Lexulous, trolling Facebook, feeling guilty about not taking pictures, and fantasizing about eating Red Vines.
- I am tired of feeling guilty for not writing here. Hobbies shouldn't make us feel guilty.
- The biggest reason, and the reason why I don't just leave the archives here and consciously work to free myself of the not-posting guilt: My anonymity is pretty much completely blown. It's mostly my own fault. I don't mind so much for myself -- I'm not stalker material -- but I live in a small town, and pretty much everything you ever heard about people talking in small towns is true, and this blog has been connected to me personally and publicly -- and thereby to my kids and my husband and my family and to everyone else I may ever have described -- because I linked to it a couple of times on Facebook and Twitter. (Also, bing.com has it come up under a search for my name, because it accesses whois data. Kind of you, bing.com! You're awesome.) My kids are old enough to be embarrassed to have people know private things about them, and while I'm not an unkind person, I may have said something about someone that seemed OK at the time because hey, the odds of anyone reading this who would know the person I was discussing were extremely small. Now, the odds are almost a certainty. There are many things that are OK to discuss with close friends (which many of you are), who genuinely care, or total strangers, who might be interested for impersonal reasons but who couldn't pick you out of a lineup if justice depended on it, but not with people who fall in between. And this puts a damper on almost everything I would write, except the most innocuous things about my garden (and how many garden updates did I do this year?) and book reviews (SOB) and the like. There have been many times in the last few months when I have thought about a blog post and discarded the idea because some aspect of it fell into that gray area. And I've already unpublished a large chunk of archives, written back in the more-anonymous days when I didn't have to worry about hurting anyone's feelings or violating anyone's privacy so I might not have been as careful as I should have been, especially in moments of frustration or hurt.
It makes me sadder than I thought it would to write this. I will miss sharing my thoughts with the few of you who are still here, and with random Googlers looking for who knows what. I will miss your input on matters silly and serious. I will miss having a reason to put my thoughts into words and to preserve them. I have missed this, already. I can't say that I won't start a new blog somewhere else where I can again have the relative freedom of anonymity, and be careful to maintain it. But if I do, it won't be right away and I won't be able to write about it here, anyway. I guess maybe if you would like to know if and when that happens, you can leave a comment with a contact email.
Thank you for a really fun six years. :)
