Mind the Gap

On weekends in particular I am acutely aware of how little I have updated this blog from the daily posts of last year, with gaps of days or sometimes weeks between postings. My original goal was to write in here on weekends and at the Wednesday night Meetup, but some of the Meetup magic has faded as of late (I'm hoping to get back into it in a couple of weeks when work calms down, and I want my writing class to be a bigger focus at the moment), so everything falls by the side of the road and my life spells itself out instead in short snippets on Facebook and Twitter. For my fried-out attention span it seems to be all I can handle.

Sooner or later though I miss writing in this blog so much so that it creates an ache, and I also think to myself, "Ah, the posts are so rare, perhaps we should re-think what we want the theme to be." The original blog at Yahoo 360 and the beginning days of this blog were about healing from the onslaught of culture shock from the Midwest to California, but now I am drawn to writing of California as though it were the constant and progressive adventure. I focus now on how the title of blog is defined in terms of keeping enough of my Midwestern-ness without losing the spirit that enabled me to know myself here, too. Sometimes I feel that's lost--I go all black and white on the world (defining myself as only Midwestern and/or only Californian). I find myself (more so recently with what is once again an unrealistic workload) stopping unexpectedly and remembering that I live in San Francisco and being dazzled by that. A million things could strike the spark, but mostly working in a building you could find anywhere across the country (ah, the joy of working in a "chain store") and then stepping out and seeing the Transamerica Pyramid in the distance. I'm shocked back into grace there. It's a tourist moment that hasn't died after five years and, because of where I'm from, probably never die.

There are curiosities and events occuring right now that I can only discover on the web (Facebook, Twitter, news feeds, You Tube), but trapping myself in the voter booth box of a laptop doesn't gain me much in real experience. To paraphrase Shania Twain, "Okay, so you know how work the web...that don't impress me much..." Not that I do things to impress others, by any means. And not that a better working of the web isn't needed on my part (there's still much to learn, grasshopper). But at the end of the day in the dark I'm on Facebook and Twitter feeding the beast, or learning Google applications like Latitude and Reader and Notebook, or checking out Quillpill, and then that bleeds into the weekend, what with podcasts and all, and pretty soon the sum of my days is on a phosphorus screen. And it tain't quality--I miss pushing whole adventures out and my thoughts on them, particularly here or in my other blogs of environmental or artistic note.

I'm working out a system to do better.

Balance, my dear reader, is a measure of constant awareness.