If a blog post hits the Internet and no one is around to see it…
Once again I find myself wishing to blog more, but not really succeeding. That begs the question of why blogging is important to me. I guess the real reason I’m sensitive about the subject is that I feel less and less connected in my life in general. In many ways beyond blogging, I feel my connection to the real world collapsing. My local world used to be interconnected. I saw my friends frequently, and my “work” (school) created an area of common interest. It wasn’t that I was friends with my classmates, but simply that my friends had a common understanding, a common environment that created a solidarity across which to share ideas and partake in common interests.
Now I spend most of my time at work, where I don’t really care to make friends. Talking about work hardly sustains friendship (or interest) for very long, and I doubt my interests dovetail with those of my coworkers very well. In a lot of ways, I miss academia. I never found my balance, but it certainly felt like I belonged there. While I like my job most nights, every once in a while I start wondering what I’m doing there.
I also haven’t done a very good job maintaining my social network. I get to see my close local friends about every other week, but there seems to be a pall that hangs over the meetings. The old energy is gone. My friends that have moved are even further away. I keep promising to call Jenn and James, but the appropriate time window always slips by. A promise I keep making to myself, repeatedly broken. I want to talk to them the way that I used to, but maybe I’m worried (or simply know) that the conversation would have the same pall, with the most relevant part being the silence of all that is left unspoken.
And then there’s the blog, symptom of my ailment. It was supposed to be part reflective journal, part editorial. Instead I’ve been ignoring it, partly out of a sense that I have nothing to share (or can share). Or perhaps my situation feels too static. I don’t think it’s much of a surprise that I don’t see myself as a CO for the rest of my life, and yet movement toward a new path is painfully slow. My efforts last fall met with failure, and what I can offer this fall is uninspiring. Past that things get hazy. In any case, I want to be able to report some grand new direction, but it just isn’t there at this point, so I generally say nothing here.
They say opportunity knocks (and sometimes just waits around to be noticed), and I feel like I’m peering out the front window, like I’m waiting for the postman to arrive. In my life I’ve had the wonderful luck to have opportunity follow closely the inconveniences that come up, as a seeming bounce when I hit the pavement. Now it seems like opportunity is overdue.
I know that some people say that you have to make your own opportunity, but anything along those lines requires a pretty big, capitalized Master Plan at this point. Or maybe I just need more patience.
Today I am Going to Fly 