Blogging Is Not a Chore

Personal blogging (as distinct from blogging for work, which is an entirely different animal), shouldn't be a chore. There aren't supposed to be deadlines, or a sense of obligation, or any sort of pressure at all.

So why does all of that sound like a lie?

Right now, it's 4:35 AM ET; it is safe to say I wouldn't be up right now doing this entry, save for the fact that tomorrow is the President's Day holiday, so this will be my second 5 AM bedtime in a row.

(I would write more about that, except that would be going out of order, and besides, I haven't uploaded those photos yet.)

If there is any sort of sense of obligation or pressure, I suppose it's all self-imposed, as there are probably less than a dozen people who see this blog in any given week.

Part of it is artistic pride, or something close to it. I like my ideas to make sense and my words to sound right; I like my sentences and paragraphs to be as tight and well-structured as I can make them, with the ideas and thoughts grouped together and in the right order.

With photos, I like mine to be treated right, so that you can at least see what's going on (even if it's just a snapshot). I like writing robust captions that provide a narrative and bring in outside information, so that they would at least be theoretically interesting to someone who didn't care about the subject matter (which is typically any random night out with my friends).

All this holds even if I'm the only person reading.

Even when you factor those rare times when people may actually be waiting to see the pictures that I've taken (or that have been taken with my camera), the only additional pressure is that of time. I don't think I work any differently when I know someone is going to see what I did.

Anyway, they say that the enemy of the perfect is the good, and that good enough is good enough -- I know, because I say it often enough. And this is just diarying writ large -- it's supposed to be ephemeral, raw, unedited, stream-of-consciousness.

I guess it's because I see a lot of shit blogs every day. Stuff where it looks like the creators didn't care enough enough about the content or the reader to do a good job, or even a passable one.

I don't want anything of mine to be anything close to that.