Now the question is, Where am I going to fly to, on my new ticket, in the next two weeks? – since I can’t use it to go abroad, and I can’t fly while I’m abroad, and it expires in a year. I suppose I could give it away. That’s not likely.
While I’m asking questions, the other question is, What do people blog about? I had thought, before I started this blog, that it was an ideal solution to the problems of I’d come across while keeping journals. Keeping a journal, when I’ve managed to stick to it for any length of time, has always proved to be an extremely valuable activity.
But I couldn’t ever manage to stick to it for any length of time. I had two explanation for that. One was that, since I didn’t have any audience for what I was writing, I couldn’t really give myself a character for what I wanted to say. The only possible audience I could imagine was an older, wiser self, or an older, less energetic self, and the character I assumed in playing up to that audience shamed me terribly. It’s very shameful to deliberately play false, and humiliating as well, when the only one who might think poorly of you for doing it, or not doing it well enough, is yourself. The other explanation was that, since I had no audience, no one hearing what I had to say would be hearing news. That makes it difficult to select things to say. Select is the wrong word, since I would, more often than not, simply not have anything to say.
Correspondence with a few individuals seemed to solve both these problems, and looking back over my old emails I see they’ve been at least as valuable to me as journals to organize my thoughts. Except that in correspondence, my thoughts have been necessarily limited by other concerns associated with those I write. There are topics that I know don’t interest, or irritate, certain of my correspondants, and other topics I don’t feel comfortable pursuing that I pursued with these correspondants.
As I say, blogs seemed to be a wonderful solution to the above problems. Only now, I can’t quite get a handle on how the format’s supposed to work. I have the feeling that an online journal isn’t quite what I have on my hands here – so I’ve been looking around at blogs, to see what I like to read. I’m not quite on track yet, though.