Blogging

I'm approaching the end of my first month of blogging and it has been an interesting experience.  I started blogging for a few reasons.  I wanted an excuse to write and to try to get the ol' noggin working again.  I hate to flog this horse, but I am quite seriously depressed and one of the symptoms of this insidious disease is that concentration goes in the toilet and general thinking skills tank.  I wouldn't say writing used to be easy for me, but because of my job as a policy analyst in the Canadian federal public service, writing was a huge part of my daily routine and it usually had to be done under tight deadlines.  To say nothing of the always deadly workload of graduate school.  Anyway, whatever facility I had for writing has gone out the window in the past year and a half, and I would like to get some of my mojo back.

Another reason I wanted to start a blog, and this blog in particular, was because I wanted to move beyond reading about things (like woodworking, carving, metalworking, home improvement among others) and actually start doing these activities; I wanted to "take on" various projects and chronicle my experience as I went along.  I was inspired by Mark Frauenfelder's book, Made by Hand, which followed his own foray into DIY-land.

I have a number of these projects in the hopper, but I quickly decided I wanted to write - rant really - about a lot of different things that had nothing to do with DIY.  Also, I have become hopelessly addicted to following how many page views I am getting.  I check my Blogger dashboard, oh, about 50 times a day (in case you're interested, 423 since I started writing this blog on December 7).  I did a brief stint of brutal and shameless self-promotion, posting my blog URL on my Facebook friends' walls, but I always felt a little cheap, so I stopped doing that.  I've registered my URL with Google in the hopes that'll boost my views through that most popular of search engines.

I'm not quite sure why this has become so important to me.  I can't claim to have a big ego.  Indeed, I usually like to live my life in the background and I've reached an age where I no longer need a lot of external validation to feel self worth.  In short, I just don't care what other people think of me (though I am receptive to what people have to say about the content of my posts and enjoy engaging in debate).

All that to say that I have enjoyed my blogging experience even though it has often been difficult.  I hope I can continue to find topics to write about and that people keep reading, even if they are all my friends.  So, til next time, I bid you all goodbye.