Hey, how’s it going?

So, it’s April. The year 2017, which, if you ask me, doesn’t even sound like a real year. It sounds like something from a science fiction movie about a futuristic world. In my mind, it’s still 1996 or so. In my mind, I’m still 21 years old. Or so.

It’s been about eight months since my last real blog post. Aside from the two-year blogging break I took after retiring Absolutely Vile in 2005, this is the longest I’ve gone without actively blogging since 1998 (which was 19 years ago, if you’re keeping count, and also two years later than where I feel like time stopped—maybe that’s significant, who knows), and it feels…not right. But it also felt necessary to take a break.

I don’t know where I fit in the world of blogging anymore. That’s never really mattered to me in terms of content (much to the chagrin of those readers who throw their arms up at the slightest mention of anything even vaguely political), but I’ve never been able to figure out if this is a job. I mean, it’s not “what I do for a living,” clearly, but is it supposed to be work? Am I supposed to think about compensation? Can I even afford to do it if I don’t think about getting some kind of financial return? And what if I actually like partnering with brands? Is that wrong? Does anyone even care, anyway? And did I actually move to New Mexico? (What is that beautiful house? Where does that highway go to?)

I don’t have any answers, I’m just asking the questions.

You know how sometimes you set little goals for yourself to incentivize actions? If you’re as good at procrastination as I am, then you’ll know what I mean:
“If I finish reading this entire 800-page book, I’ll vacuum the house.”
“If I watch the entire third season of The Mindy Project in one day, I’ll work on my taxes.”
“If I paint the whole bedroom before midnight, I’ll sweep the garage.”
“If I get my learner’s permit, take driving lessons, get my license, and lose 10 pounds, I’ll write a blog post.”

You get what I’m saying. These procrastination techniques don’t make any sense—the incentivizing action is almost never related in any way to the end goal. When you achieve Mastercrastinator-level status in life, you start stacking the deck against yourself—you can barely get anything from column B done if you make sure column A is full of failures. And it pretty much never feels good. And then you lose track of what it is that’s making you feel bad, exactly, and you convince yourself that it was the thing you didn’t do, not the fact that you didn’t do it.

Last night I removed the sidebar ads from my blog. I tweaked my bio. I made some minor design changes. I hoped that when I woke up in the morning that I’d want to start blogging again, and that I wouldn’t set up an imaginary column A to prevent myself from just going ahead and doing it.

Hey! Hi! Hello.