Happy Halloween!
When last I spoke about the state of the blog, I finally decided for sure that I'm not going to be blogging for a living, and I may not have said it in so many words, but the main effect of that was that reclassified blogging from PLAY to PASTIME, and boy, that has made all the difference. The whole work/play paradigm is about what, balancing my life, which is to say balancing my time. A life is just time, is what. I feel like our life projects are time projects. Changing how I feel about blogging from something that is done as an end in itself that is a means to an end to something that is done as an end itself that is an end in itself has changed how I feel about my blog, and also about my time, and also about my life. I suppose this is just to say that PLAY feels different than PASTIME, obviously it does, that's why they're different things. I also guess this is to say that I needed something more like pastime in my life, and that this time I didn't need anything new in my life: I just needed to look at something that was already in my life in a new way.
You know what life is to me? Time and feelings.
Blogging feels different because now I only blog when I'm feeling it. I mean, right? It's something that's done as an end in itself that's an end in itself, the only reason to do it is if you feel like doing it itself. And circumspicere, I feel like it a lot. So just to get back to the actual state of the blog for a sec, I needed an enormous number of hits at the end of September to exceed my highest month so I thought I wouldn't, but then I did get enormous hits right at the end of the month and I exceeded my highest month by three, and then it kept rolling into October and was looking like I might be good for 10,000 hits for the first time ever, and then in the middle of the month I just ran out. And the new deal is when I'm out, I'm out. Hits have stayed pretty strong regardless of the dark, so hey. My racerback dress does the rounds on Pinterest now and again, and it looks maybe like people are getting some use out of my muscles and movement series, but who knows. I don't know how much of all of this is just robots, I don't really know how stats work.
But pastime, also, feels different, because now blogging is, you know, an option for pastime. It doesn't feel like, argh, I'm using my downtime to keep up my bloggg, no rest for the wickeddddd. Blogging is downtime. I can watch a little television, and then I get a little idea and work it out on my laptop, and it's fun, more fun a lot of times than second guessing Horatio Caine depending on how many minutes we're into this episode.
This is counter to advice that you sometimes get about Being A Writer, discipline and whether or not you feel like it or not and so forth. But that is almost as specifically as you can get for writing that is a means to an end, which is not the only kind of writing, that's what I'm saying, there's like three other kinds. So there's no reason to get stuck on just one kind, you can switch it up and see what happen. And this applies to ::waves:: everything.
So blogging is more fun, pastime is more fun, life is more fun. That is a win.
