On Words: Blogging about Blogging

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There are some things in life that you have to do. You have to work if you want to earn an income and advance in your career, even when a day on the beach sounds so very tempting.

You have to wear pants to the grocery store, even when you don’t feel like getting up to put them on but you really want ice cream and that is the only way you’re going to get it.

You also have to pay taxes and go to the doctor and do a lot of other things that aren’t pleasant, but necessary from time to time.

There are also things in life that you do because you like to. You go for long runs by the lake. You drink wine on patios with your girlfriends until you’re laughing really loud and the waiter all but tells you to shut up.

You get your nails done and you go on long road trips for no reason at all.

Then there are some things in life that you do because they’ve become routine.

There is no explaining why you stay in the dead end job you can’t stand but haven’t sent out a single resume, why why you stay in the relationship that no longer makes you feel good about yourself or why you live in a city that has turned you into a person you no longer recognize.

After almost four years of writing here, I was starting to feel like this blog was something I did because I had to do. I wrote here because I always wrote here, even when it was starting to feel like a job that I hated.

So I stopped doing it.

When I started a blog in May 2008 it was because putting words together is what I like to do and typing seemed more efficient than writing in a journal (not to mention that I am pretty certain I exceeded my lifetime quote of marble composition notebooks keeping journals in high schools and I’ll be damned if I ever want to revisit those).

When I wrote my last post in April 2012, this website had turned into a rat race.

I wrote because I had to get a post up and because if I didn’t quickly post the best possible recipe for chipotle chicken fingers, someone else probably would and then they might get a book deal instead of me.

Would I still love to become a published author?

Absolutely.

It also just so happens that I love to write recipes and let’s call a spade a spade: eating is pretty much my favorite.

Yet, when I was taking creative writing classes in college I used to roll my eyes at the prose some of my classmates shared during workshops and fervently wish that I had more classes in the business school building where all of the good looking guys studied between classes.

I took communications classes because I longed to connect with people and what better way to do that than in the communications field? What I really loved to do was write stories and if it wasn’t for the longing I’d always had to be surrounded by people, to be a connector, I might be living a totally different life right now.

I’m not saying I want to be, but that it’s crazy to think about.

Throughout my various phases of wanting to be a teacher or a lawyer or a publicist all I have ever wanted to do is write and the best part about that is that I don’t need a fancy degree or a license and I can do that no matter where I am or what else I am doing from nine to five.

Despite the occasional run-on sentence (which I can’t bring myself to edit), I even think I’m pretty good at it.

I think my point here is that I need to write in a way that feels like me, not the way I feel like I should sound. I’m just not exactly sure what that is yet.

As much as I detest writing a blog post about blogging, I felt as disingenuous returning after three months with a post about risotto as I had started to feel this past winter.

So today, words. Tomorrow, risotto.

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