Alive and kicking

Ok, so I haven't posted in six months. My bad.

Reading back over some of my old posts I kind of wish now I had that record, but the problem is I'm still not sure just how public I want that record to be. Do I need to post for posterity the fact that I made an ass out of myself at the company party? Everyone at my company already knows about that (ironically, they're the only ones I wish didn't know about it... I have no problem relating these stories to friends that already know I act like a jackass. Such is the risk of over-imbibing at the company party. Everyone stay tuned to see if I've learned my lesson by next year.) So I suppose that's fair game. There's my recent trip to Sweden which was pretty cool (haha, see what I did there?)--pictures of Stockholm, Copenhagen (yes I know that's not in Sweden), the Ice Hotel and me in one of those awesome furry hats are here. New Year's was great too, what with the fan-friggin'-tastic New Year's Eve party and then the fan-friggin'-tastickier Rose Bowl game where we beat the crap out of Michigan. Again.

But aside from the odd noteworthy event, I feel as though I'm too busy to post about industry issues, books, and other topics that are actually worthy of discussion that I accidentally spend time thinking/reading about. And what's left bears uncanny resemblance to the diary I kept in middle school. The only real sign I've made any progress at all since then is the more complex sentence structure and a larger vocabulary.

So I suppose my writer's block stems from the fact that the stuff that's easiest to write about is stuff that I don't feel I can write about, at least not in a public forum. All my favorite conversation topics revolve around work and friends from work (a.k.a.: gossip) or things that I don't necessarily want work or friends from work to know about, and guess what, I work at an internet company. In the search engine marketing department, no less. Query my name on Google and this blog is the first thing that comes up. As a result, scrubbing my writing of anything I don't want publicized takes up enough time that it becomes prohibitive to posting on a regular basis, and is particularly detrimental to the generally on-the-fly style of writing that usually characterizes blogging. Hence my prolonged silence.

Given my attitude, one wonders why I ever started a blog in the first place. Back in grad school, there wasn't as much of a need to censor myself, and I had enough free time to get to know the Chicago bar scene, skip reading assignments, watch every episode of Law & Order: SVU ever made, show up to class an hour late, and blog. And when I posted complaints about how school was going, it was generally railing against the dictates of graduate school assignments and idiosyncrasies. Even when school was hard work, it was still fun and different. But no one wants to hear you complain about your job, particularly when there's precious little to complain about ('ugh, our catered lunch was from [insert caterer name here] again'). And the things that make you unhappy at work aren't frustrations with the work load you imposed on yourself by choosing to go to grad school in the first place, but gossip and bickering and politics. The things that irritate you can no longer be chalked up to "That's life!"--now they have a face and a name. Neither of which can be included here. And thus my dilemma of wanting to write something occasionally, but not knowing what to write.

I think that concludes today's musings. In our next episode, find out if our heroine is in fact able to resolve this conflict! Tune in in another six months for a post that will probably be a whole lot like this one! Until then, this is Adra, signing off.