This is my blog. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

I used to have a blog. I had a blog before blogging was cool, and when many of us were still holding out against the term “blog” as a horrid neologism that contributed nothing new to the world. I gave up and eventually embraced the word – I even blogged about it.

I wrote my own blogging software. I modified it and gave it to a few other people for use on their own sites. One day I got sick of having to add features whenever I wanted to do something new, so I switched to LiveJournal. Some time later I switched again, this time to WordPress.

I blogged everything about my life all in the one place. I changed my mind and split out my personal and professional lives, maintaining two blogs at the same time. I considered merging them back.

I considered lots of things, but somehow just stopped writing about them. I stopped maintaining my WordPress installs, and got sick of fighting comment spam. I stopped blogging altogether. My hosting disappeared and I didn’t bother rehosting the blogs elsewhere.

I discovered twitter – eventually, after holding out for a while due to a failure to understand why anyone would bother – and that gave me just enough of an outlet that I felt no need for anything more. On the rare occasions that I felt unable to express myself (trimming a thought to fit within 140 characters is a challenge I actually enjoy) I didn’t feel sufficiently motivated to start up a new blog for the purpose of writing a single post.

What’s changed? Nothing really. Well, that’s clearly not true, because here we are. Perhaps the occasional impulses to write something longer have been building up, and suddenly crossed some threshold. Perhaps it’s because I’m planning to embark on a writing project, and feel like I should try to get something moving again. Perhaps it’s because I visited MONA – the Museum of Old and New Art – yesterday, and feel a (desperate) need to get some thoughts down somewhere about that experience. Perhaps it’s because I should be doing something else, and have turned procrastination into an art form.

Will I keep it up? Who knows. Going by past experience I’d have to say yes – but only intermittently, and not indefinitely. Someone tweeted yesterday a quote which the internet seems to think should be attributed to Dorothy Parker – “I hate writing; I love having written.” I couldn’t agree more.