Back to Blogging

I am finally getting back to blogging. Really. I am currently working on a post about this past weekend’s OBX races, but it’s not quite done. In the meantime, here’s a link to a post that I wrote several years ago: To Build a Fire.

The post, and the man who inspired it, remain two of my favorites.

Farewell to Facebook

Dear Blog,

 

I just posted the following on my Facebook page.  I hope it’s not too late for us…

 

~~~~ 

 

Facebook,

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about us lately, and I’ve decided that I need to do other things, and see other sites.  Like my blog, for instance.  Since you and I got together a few years ago, I’ve barely posted anything on my blog – and I really enjoyed doing that.  You and I have had some good times together, sure – but I miss writing longer, more substantive posts.  One or two lines with a link attached just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

 

But really, I owe it to you to be fully open and honest.  So here goes.  You’re clingy.  You’re always … there.  On my laptop, on my desktop, on my ipad, even on my phone.  I need space.  Space, and time.  I’m not getting any younger, after all, and there are so many things that I’d like to do.  Write more, read more, learn more, play more, do more.  Be more.  But the days roll on, and I find myself checking for status updates, posting something that might be witty but won’t be remembered, and then guaranteeing myself even more updates to wade through by clicking “like” on something or another – all the while feeling spread too thin at work, at home, and everywhere in between.

 

So, it’s time for a change.  I guess this is it, for now, at least.  I don’t know what’s going to happen down the road.  Who knows, we may even get back together again at some point.  But if we do, it will have to be as friends, nothing more. 

 

I’ll still be around.  Email me, if you want to talk.  If you’re in the mood to read, you can find me at my blog:  https://wagsoutside.wordpress.com/.  If you want to know how work is going, you can find me on LinkedIn.  But it’s time for the two of us to take a break.

 

Thanks for everything, and no hard feelings, OK?

Hanging Up the Cape

It’s been seven months since my last blog post, and even longer since my last good long run.  That’s pretty sad considering the grounding and stabilizing roles that writing and running have each played for me over the past few years.

So what have I been doing in the interim?  Someone asked me recently where I keep my Superman cape.  It wasn’t meant as a compliment – it was an observation that I tend to fall into/get led into/jump into “fix it” mode with work and  my various activities – so much so that the day-to-day aspect of living life falls by the wayside.

What has it gotten me?  It’s finally dawned on me that I probably cannot save the world on my own – probably not even my little corner of it.  Even if I could, it’s not worth the cost.  I can do my fair share, and then some – but, barring an unanticipated appointment as king for a day, I would do well to end my Quixote-esque quest to save the kingdom.

An admittedly cryptic post – but what do you expect after 7 months?

A Single Step

Confucius purportedly said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.  True enough.  But, I’ve found that the longer I have put off posting to this blog, the more difficult it has become to resume doing so.     

Why?  Expectations, mostly.  Not so much the expectations of others, but rather the expectations that I place upon myself.  If I am going to write something for public consumption, I want it to be good.  And, as the dozen or so unfinished posts that I have saved in my “draft” folder will attest, I’ve had a hard time coming up with something that qualifies. 

Let me be clear here that I’m under no illusion that I’ve consistently met that lofty standard in the past.  Even a quick browse through the archives of this blog will reveal that for every post that’s a reasonably solid piece of writing, there are many more that are throwaways.  But, with this blog having been dormant for so long, the post that finally does break the blogging ice ought to be worthwhile, or significant, or noteworthy, or thought-provoking, or side-splittingly funny – not just a blatantly obvious attempt to get something – anything – posted in order to break out of an overlong blogging dry spell.

Oh, well.  Maybe tomorrow….

Remember Me?

It’s been over 3 months since my last post. By any standard, that’s pretty pathetic output. It’s particularly weak given the fact that I tend to think in blog posts.

Really, I do. I’ve written many a captivating post while in the middle of a long run, or driving down the highway, or cutting the grass. Unfortunately, by the time I get in front of the computer, typically late at night after everyone else is in bed, the inspiration will have faded, or will at least be clouded by fatigue. Even more frequently, I’ll fall victim to the siren song of work emails, and by the time I’ve finished wading through those, I will have little creative gas left in the tank for posting.

But 3 months?! I’m turning over a new leaf. After all, writing something that I’m happy with, and occasionally learning that what I’ve written has resonated with someone, is far more fulfilling than most of the things that I’ve let take its place. It’s time to reprioritize.

I won’t promise daily posting, but I will commit to regular posting. (And no, by “regular” I don’t mean once every 3 months.) While I know that my modest readership has dwindled during my hiatus (even my wife has threatened to remove my dormant blog from her Favorites), I’m hoping there are still a few of you out there.

So, I’m calling on you to help me get the ball rolling. At the bottom of this post, I’m setting out a list of potential blog post titles. Let me know which ones to start with, and I’ll go on from there.

In no particular order, here are some that I’ve been working on but have never committed to paper … er, computer. And yes, I realize that most of the titles are cryptic:

Live vs. Living
Swallowed by the Dragon
Boxer
Death Race
Bobcat to Eagle to Tiger
Why Extreme?
Kairos
Fundamental
Practice Part IV
Average Life
Greek Like Me

Two on Twitter

One of the blogs that I follow is Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs. The site has recently featured two articles on Twitter. In each, O’Keefe defends Twitter as being not just useful, but downright indispensable – or soon to be, anyway. In “40% of Twitter is mindless babble. So what?”, he lauds Twitter as a networking tool. In “Twitter Search for lawyers and law firms: Why it’s so important”, he takes it a step further: “In the near future you will not be able to live without (the) real time conversation and information” that Twitter offers.

I dunno. Whenever Twitter comes up in conversation, I have a hard time defending it too vigorously when a scoffer shakes his head and says “I don’t get it.” For every “how to” or “essential rules” tweet, there are half a dozen more announcing what somewhat ate for breakfast or letting the world know that they are getting ready to walk their dog.

How do I know this? I tweet. After all, in the immortal words of Bluto Blutarsky, it don’t cost nothin’.

But I’m still not convinced that it’s worth much more than that.

Blawger Survivor

Anyone who follows my blog (all 3 of you) knows that I’ve been in a bit of a dry spell lately. In fact, I haven’t written anything substantial since May.

Enter Blawger Survivor. This is a blogging contest spearheaded by Sean Carter, who is a self-styled “Humorist at Law” and all-around nice guy. I’ll be trying to outlast Sean and 16 other “blawgers” (lawyers who blog) in posting a blog entry per day for the next 3 weeks. For those of you who post every day (including Jennifer, who was 365 for 365 last year), this may not seem like a big deal. But, given my paltry output of late, it would be a vast improvement.

We’ll see how it goes.

One down.

Still Here

Jennifer told me I should post a blog entry to let everyone know that I’m still alive.

I am.

It’s been a busy few days … er, few weeks … er, month and a half.

Stay tuned.

The Real World

“Been outside lately?”  This comment to my last post was a gentle nudge from my wife to get back on the blogging wagon.  Or is it get off of the non-blogging wagon?  I’d plead busy schedule, but my wife is every bit as busy as I am, and somehow she manages to post daily.

Don’t expect that from me, but I’ll try to do better.

That said, where to begin?  I can add little to what she’s already posted on our Emerald Isle beach week.  She might have ooh’d and aah’d a bit more over the size of the fish that we caught, the ferocity of the waves that we battled, or the number of miles that we ran, but other than that she did a good job of capturing the week.  Anyway, she likes to keep her posts in the non-fiction category, so I guess I have no room to complain.

Suffice it to say that it was a great week. So far I’ve been able to retain just enough of it to get me through the day-to-day realities of the “real world” of work and other responsibilities that greeted us upon our return.

As I think about that last sentence, I realize that I need to reconsider my usage of the “real world” terminology. I know that many years from now I will still be cherishing memories of our time at the beach. At the same time I very much doubt that I will remember anything that happened to me at work last week.

Maybe that’s a clue as to which is actually the “real world”.

  

On Writing

I am not sure why I do not write for a living. 

That statement sounds presumptuous, but it is not meant to be – I am making no claims as to talent.  In fact, it’s probably fair to say that the only thing that I have in common with Faulkner and Grisham is that we all live(d) in Charlottesville.  I make it simply because out of all of the career options that I have explored or can imagine, writing is the only one that doesn’t seem like work.

I have always enjoyed writing, and I have always done a lot of it.  Again making no claim as to talent, I do find that I write more coherently than I speak.  I have never been much of an extemporaneous speaker.  Any public talk that I give, be it a business presentation, closing argument, or church invocation, can generally be found written out word-for-word somewhere.  This practice doesn’t just apply to public speaking, either – some of my most serious discussions with my wife have been in written form.  If I am not able to see (and consider and revise) what I am going to say and how I am going to say it, what I wind up saying will invariably be less effective than it could be.

I was an English major in college, which was perfect for me.  Many of my classes were exam-free, with papers being the only graded work.  In a few of my upper-level courses, we were simply required to turn in 50 pages’ worth of written work by the end of the semester – it was up to us to determine topic, format, and schedule.  While this approach gave me a dangerous license to procrastinate, I loved the freedom, flexibility and creativity it afforded.  I never found the writing onerous, even when I had a lot of pages left to write and little semester left in which to write them.  Indeed, I’ve often found that deadline-induced adrenaline does much to inspire the muse!    

Outside of class, I wrote for the college newspaper, and later, for my law school alumni magazine.  I had no illusions of being, or aspirations to be, a journalist.  Far from being a Woodward or Bernstein in the making, I wrote soft public interest-type articles – a retrospective on the retirement of a professor here, a publicity piece on the start-up of a new student club there.  I wasn’t writing to make news, or even to report it – I was writing simply to write, and to be read.  I did it because it was fun.   

I used to be a rather prolific letter writer as well, before the demands of career and family started to eat up every waking moment.  My mother saved many of those letters, and at some point I hope to go back through them.  Despite an introspective bent, I have never been much of a diarist or journal writer, but a fairly sizable and significant chunk of my life is documented in those letters.   

The technology of the last several years has been a mixed blessing as far as my writing goes.  The advent of email has all but ended letter writing.  Blogging, however, has opened up a tremendous new world of possibilities and opportunities.  The fact that I am able to sit here and write, and have what I am writing be accessible to anyone who wants to seek it out or happens to stumble across it, is mind-boggling.    

If only I could make a living at it.