Why I blog

I hadn't quite realized it's been over 45 days since I last blogged about anything ... but it's time to get back. And if nothing else the hiatus has helped me figure out why I blog.

In no particular order:

• I blog because it reminds me of a time when I was in junior high, and my best friend was in 6th grade. We didn't get to spend any time together at school even though our school was K-12, so the only time we got to spend with each other was on the long train rides back to each of our homes). So to make up for it we kept an "exchange diary," (trust Wikipedia to have a reference for an obscure Japanese custom common among high school girls), and writing my blog feels like keeping an exchange diary, except with all my friends
• So fundamentally I think of my blog as a relatively public journal. And as such, I like to write about all sorts of different things that shape my view of life, rather than going narrow and deep about one particular thing, even if that thing is as important as GlobalGiving.
• This is in contrast to other people like Elisa Camahort, whom I admire greatly, and currently maintains, at her count, 8 blogs. I had the privilege of meeting her in person last week, and asked her how she did it, and understood more clearly that Elisa's audience is segmented into different elements of who she is and what she does and is a maven about so she actually feels responsible to keep her blogs on topic, as it were. This is why I'm not a professional writer, much less a professional blogger, like she is. I'm in awe.
• And because I'm an amateur, I do stupid things like set my blog comments to be moderated (because I had been warned about spammers), and not realize that the moderation requests are going to an email address I had set up solely for the purpose of setting up a Google account and which I do not check at all. So Tim, Elisa, Daniel, and Beth--public apologies for letting your comments lie fallow for so long. And here I was thinking nobody read my blog anyway ...

And one more thing. Because this blog is really about my life, but the part of my life that I am willing to show anyone in the world, it's not deeply personal in that it doesn't expose anything about anyone else that they would not make public themselves, or about anything I wouldn't mind some stranger coming up to me and talking to me about. Which means that sometimes things or events dominate my life that I don't really care to blog about, which relegates blogging to 10th or 12th place in my life. But then time passes and you have to blog again, just because it's fun to share your thoughts.

Motome, are you reading this?