One Year, Over Three

This is the 366th post in this space, which strikes me as a kind of blogiversary: that's a year's worth of posts, at the rate of one a day, which would be three times as fast as I actually wrote them. I've been reading some interesting posts about whether blogging has moved past its moment. My selfish reaction to those posts was to worry a bit about the fact that my own posting has slowed, fearing that I'd stopped posting and accidentally missed the end of blogging as we know it (rather like I seem to have missed the Last Time Curious Girl Got in the Beloved Sling).

I started blogging because I wanted to write posts like the ones I enjoyed reading. My bullet lists of late notwithstanding, I like blogging little mini-essays. I love the beautiful writing I see in other people's blogs, and I wanted an outlet for that kind of writing. I also loved the interaction--thank you so much for reading and commenting! The academic work I do involves surprisingly little interaction. Articles or manuscripts get reader reviews, and conference papers get responses, but published articles get oddly little conversation going, and it's not nearly so immediate. So I love the immediacy of blogging. I also love the freedom to write, the ability to write about some academic issues, some adoption issues, some food issues, whatever.

I didn't think this blog was rooted in a place, but since we've moved to Germany, I've found it hard to blog. And found it hard to do lots of other things, too (like find the darn second set of car keys, although I have found my other recipe binder, although not before I had to search out a substitute rollout cookie recipe which turned out to be fabulous.) As I said in the last post, and many of you kindly commented, moving is hard. It's lonely, sometimes, and I've been struggling with that loneliness at work in particular. On the whole, although I loved being department chair, I'm seeing now how much time it took up each week. I get so much less e-mail now, and there are so many fewer people stopping by my office on any given day. I'm glad to have that time back, but I've not always been using it well.

Tonight I realized, though, that the time is now mine, and I need to start using it. I need to write, and let the ideas flow from the words. So this is my new year's aspiration: to use my time, and to write words.

All of which is a rather navelgazing return to posting without lists, but it puts my aspiration on record. I don't know why moving has seemed to freeze parts of my brain, but this post is an effort to start the thawing process.

Plenty of things here, I should add, are working just great. I've been reading once a week in Curious Girl's kindergarten class, which is a hoot. I'm biking to work, and loving that. It feels good to live here (even with a frozen brain!). I don't mean to sound all gloomy and stressed out about the move--on the whole, it's been a good move. I've gotten a lot done at work, too, and have written my fair share of memos and e-mails to move my new program along. But I've got to get beyond this sense of frustration about ideas that don't quite get articulated. And somehow, a navelgazing blog post seems like the first step in the right direction.

And on another topic: many people reading here are also readers of Moreena. Annika is having her third liver transplant tonight, and Moreena is updating her blog this evening. Fingers and toes crossed, and much love going out to all the Tiedes.