Blogs are hard

Writing a blog as an introvert is hard. For me, thoughts are all quiet and come with a heavy dose of “Why would anyone else want to know?” When considering sharing thoughts I have to over-come my initial concerns about “Who actually cares about this, and why would they care about my view on that topic”. I also tend to get bored when things I read, watch, or conversations I have become overly floaty with their descriptions or beat around the bush on a topic. Get to the point. Who, what, where, short why. If clarification is needed then ask. This gets me in trouble. Maybe not exactly trouble, but it does make me seem uninterested in conversations or topics when I’ve probably just tuned out because all the pertinent information has been shared or is likely many many sentences from being shared. And then I look bored, and people that I do like probably think I don’t like them. And it's not like I'm smarter than them, it's not like I know what they are sharing before they do. Introverts just find small talk tiring. Efforts must be made to keep up with all those extroverts that want everyone to talk to them. Trouble.

So yea, this way of thinking gets me in trouble. It also makes writing a blog a challenge. How do I convince myself to share info, maybe a story, maybe some tech babble without being silly short? How do I do it without assuming that other people approach consuming information the same way I do, “Info now! No fluff!”. Well reader, I do know that most people don’t think about conversations the way I do. So it’s not that hard on that front, its more the figuring out how to write more than 4 sentences for a blog that should be, according to the interwebs, 4 paragraphs (Oh man, college essays were an issue too).

But here we are, already on what is formatted to be paragraph 3 and I haven’t said anything useful yet. Maybe some people are still reading. I call this a big win.
Such blog. Very information. Wow.
So there. We’ve gotten all the excuses out of the way for why theses will be bad, infrequent, and probably short. But I am going to try. Now I just need a list of things to write about. Not that I have a shortage of topics that I could write about. We introverts do like to talk… about the right topic, at the right time, in the right place, to the right audience. It might take some food bribery, or promises of taking us to a nice forest and leaving us for a few hours in the quiet, but we will talk.

Paragraph 4. We’ve made it. Punch is against the wall over there, finger sandwiches and cheese are served. I have a 3 week trip coming up to Spain that has led to a few conversations with people that I don’t see every week, or even every other month, that wanted to know how to keep up with that trip. I mentioned to one of them that I had recently logged back into my Facebook account for the first time in 10 years and would likely use that for posts. Its a good idea right? Everyone’s on that place. Well, not really reader. Facebook and even more so Twitter now are increasingly hard to use without an account. Finding specific posts and people is time consuming and near impossible without logging in, and even then, feeds aren’t in chronological order, there’s no guarantee that a person or post will even show up so then you have to go to the persons page and hope that’s in the right order. It’s a whole thing. And a whole lot of silly hoops that people shouldn’t have to jump through to see what’s up. So here we are, the thing that kicked off this whole blog and website build. So yea, I specifically blame thank Justin for an unintended kick into creating this blog.

Sirs and Madams, we have paragraph 5. These are unprecedented writing times. The point of this is to have a place to share that isn’t Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media algorithmic monstrosity. Sure I have those things, I just find the ad polluted feeds, and random page promotion to be a huge drain on my energy whenever I do have to scroll through them. So here we are. Obviously in these days of always online, must build your audience I will still have to use some social media. For now I have a Flickr account for photo posting, and am looking into an Instagram account (Maybe I’ll have one of those before the next blog post).

So there we have it. A blog post, a reason for the blog to exist, and the why. I like to think that there is no fluff but I live in a house with 5 cats, there is always fluff. I’m also counting this as a paragraph, that makes 6. Longest thing I’ve written since college.