i need some meaning i can memorize...

Exactly one year ago today, I embarked on this uncertain journey towards the blogosphere. I must say that it's very difficult to consistently maintain a blog for very long: life goes on, whether you have something interesting to say or not. Time's arrogant march forward humbles even the most willful among us as the days pass without having updated, without having reviewed, or without having commented.

In a sense, I became rather disillusioned with the fickleness of blogging; in particular, I grew to despise the fact that updating the blog had become a bit of a chore. Some days, the passion was utterly nonexistent. Indeed, I saw that too many bloggers would update their blogs because they had to, and not because they had anything of substance to say. I became one of those bloggers, and so I stopped. I could not justify wasting my time on uninspired postings. Sure, the readership would be preserved, as readers naturally come back only when one updates frequently. But I soon realized that sustaining the readership was neither the goal, nor the moral standard in the world of blogging; at least it would not be so for me. If preserving the readership was to be a categorical imperative of sorts, then so was a dispassionate inauthenticity. And that I could not accept.

And so the blog became less and less a priority. Instead, I focused on relationships with others around me. While it's true that the blog could connect me to great masses of people, such connections invariably remained transitory, wholly ephemeral. Granted, I have communicated with some pretty interesting people whom, I suspect, I would much enjoy getting to know in person. Unfortunately, due to the worldwide nature of blogging, getting to know these people in person is rarely much of an option.

I'm not saying blogging is bad, or that I will stop blogging. Don't get me wrong: I've enjoyed myself immensely, especially in bickering with Jim Dedman over such topics as the Second Amendment and Nine Inch Nails, and in writing my many film reviews. I intend to continue blogging. But this past year has allowed me a pointed recognition of the blogosphere's limitations. And they are many.