Much ado about nothing

I started a blog several years ago, and I swear I was addicted to writing all the time, even if I had nothing remotely interesting to say. It didn't matter. I’d use my blog as an opportunity to just get my thoughts out, to share whatever funny events were going on in my day (or at least funny to me), and it was cathartic to just write. Even if I knew the audience who would read my thoughts consisted of only about five or six people.

Then I joined Facebook.

And all of a sudden, I had whole different arena for sharing my thoughts. And what’s more, I only had to share a sentence or two. It was painless. It was quick. It was easy, and I received feedback and comments and saw the thoughts of my friends, too. Even friends I hadn’t seen or spoken to since the playground at recess in second grade. How cool was that?

It was different from Twitter I reasoned (and have since vowed never to join). I really don’t need one more outlet for social networking that calls and beckons me to spend more idle time. Plus in many ways, I pretty much considered my status posts on Facebook to be enough “sharing.” I can post pictures in minutes, which incidentally has killed my desire to scrapbook. Instead of taking the time to write an elaborate journal entry for my pictures, I simply type a quick caption and I’m done. Almost like when my kids had a bottle for the first time after months of nursing, and must have thought “Man, you’ve been holding out on me Mom. I could’ve been full and satisfied in 5 minutes instead of 20, all I have to do is suck down this milk and I’m good to go?”

But I will say, I’ve missed the experience of just writing for the sake of writing. Having a thought and looking at it from a variety of angles – well, actually just one angle, my own. Even if no one read it, that fact didn’t matter. I’d purged my brain of something, exciting or not, and it’s that experience I miss the most.

So here’s my first blog post in ages. It’s about nothing important and nothing interesting. But I knew if I didn’t start somewhere, I wouldn’t do it. This was totally more for me than for the pleasure of any of you who happen to have lost three minutes of your life reading this boring drivel. But I don’t apologize. . .it felt good to write again. Even though, at the end of the day, I’ve said absolutely nothing.