I suppose my neglect of this blog means that I am too busy living life to be able to update that. It’s really a bit lazy to think that, and my lack of posting may just be about not prioritizing the blog, but this is where we are now.
It’s been exactly a year since I moved back to the US (in another week I will have been blogging for a year). I had high hopes for both my year off and this blog last April. I wanted to have big adventures and do some deep thinking and studying. I haven’t bicycled across Kansas, or gone on a road trip across the whole US visiting all my friends. I haven’t done hardly any reflection.
But I have driven to Rochester, NY, gone to Chicago a couple of times, and stayed at a lakehouse in the North Woods of Minnesota. We went to Israel for Jacob’s brother’s wedding, and experienced a different way of life that challenged my own value system. Jacob got a job in the architecture field, when we thought he wouldn’t be able to, and was offered a job in IT at the library. Jacob and I did buy a house. I started a business. I got to spend 10 months with my grandfather, and be with him (and my grandmother) when he died.
This blog, on the other hand, has been a bit of a wash. I planned on posting several times a week, creating an interesting and dynamic blog design, and developing up a body of work in different thematic streams (synthesizing what we’ve been doing over the past several years, urban design, graphic design and entrepreneurship were the main ones). I haven’t really given any of these topics a hard thought on this blog, just painted around the edges. And that’s a shame.
Maybe blogging isn’t for me. I’m not a writer. (That would be my sister. I wish she would blog again. But she is very busy.) However, for something else, I tried to reconstruct what I was doing in my life at different points over the last 6 years, and how events affected me. I realised my recollection of events, and particularly what I was thinking at the time, has gotten rather hazy. Having a blog where I record what has happened in my life and what I am feeling could be very useful. But does it have to be public?
I’ve often read the Age of the Internet has beget the Me Generation, or the Age of Narcissism. Apparently we’re all too focused on ourselves. That didn’t sit comfortably with me, and nagged at me whenever I thought about posting something to my blog that is about my life and my thoughts for all the world to see. But then I think of my journals from high school and college- so overwrought and embarrassing. Granted, they were written by a much more immature version of me, but I think writing for a public stage helps me to focus and maybe temper my emotions a bit. So public it is! Onwards, Carolyn!
I’ve blogged about it before, but it bears repeating – having discipline in your life makes such a difference. So back on track we go!
And I finally got rid of that horrible brown theme. I think this theme will be better suited to developing different thematic streams of posts. But it looks like I do need to include a photo with every post, otherwise the homepage is really boring and texty.
Time will tell, and it’s all up to whether or not I stick with it.
A Year Off 