Why I Keep this Blog Thing Up

I often ask myself why I do this blogging thing. I thought some more about it after reading my colleague Brian's post about his blog writing. Asides from keeping the 17-25 people who end up here every day up on all the banal elements of my life, I have kind of figured out why I started doing this and kept doing it. It's the fact that I can CREATE and PARTICIPATE by using this blog, even if the product isn't always the finest work.

There are a few things that I love in this world. I love my wife. I love my family. I love baseball. I love music. I love reading. The only thing I can really participate in anymore out of those is my marriage, and my family life. I can't really play baseball anymore thanks to an arm injury that has left my shoulder brittle and prone to reinjury, despite the surgery I had to get just to make it functional. All I can do is watch, remember, and enjoy the strategy of the game. For a short time I coached little league, but my current commitments leave me without the time to continue with that. I love listening to music. I love all sorts of music, but can play virtually none of it. I have picked up the guitar, but I am certainly not very good at it yet. All I can do is passively enjoy, and fumble through a few chords. I read. A lot. Reading is one of my passions. I read and read and read, and wonder how it is that there are people out there whose brain is able to generate the creative juices required to weave interesting tales together. People like my friend Ramsey, who are brilliant engineers by day, and extremely gifted writers by night. All I am good at is devouring the content.

All of these things are passive. Listening, reading, watching. I am passive. This blog is the only thing that I create most days that isn't just paid work. So, despite the uneven quality of the output, it's my stab at escaping passivity. I would like to say that it's cathartic, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just to talk about what I do, without having to directly bore someone to death face-to-face. Sometimes it's because I think it will help someone else. My most popular post is this Eclipse error post. It's kind of sad, because I've written all this stuff about my father, and about my work, and my ambitions, and a post about troubleshooting an IDE error is the number one post, followed closely by my gripes about my cable company. I hope to find a way in 2009 to post interesting things that are also popular. To that end, please feel free to comment anytime you wish, so that I may improve my content for those of you who out of guilt or necessity read this regularly.

Oh, and HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Radio silence will commence, as we are off to Indiana (grandparents house is an internet free zone), and your regularly scheduled swill will resume on Monday.