I am in one of those “what’s this blogging thing all about” moods again. I like the habit/hobby of posting and checking in on friends, but I am wary of the impact blogs can have on your professional life. I am not entirely certain why I’ve picked up this habit. I guess I could just blame Jen. She got me started for reasons I don’t recall. That first month or two I had illusions about the anonymity of blogging and wrote a great deal of personal material about a family loss, I soon went back and deleted most of those posts because of the traffic I was getting. Still, it was a helpful release.

My girlfriend Jes is a blogger who never blogs. She was blogging and mudding years before I knew what either of those terms meant, so maybe she’s just over it. We’re both insanely busy, but I still seem to make time for rambling here. Actually, I often use blogging as prewriting to get warmed up for an assignment and to cleanse the intellectual palette. That’s what I am doing right now. Now that I am a student again, working on a Master’s in education, I average between five and ten pages of academic prose a day; sometimes quite a bit more. Blogging can be like cleaning your desk off before you sit to work.

Perhaps the genre, as it is expressed in my blog and in the blogs I read, is closest to letter writing, with a shift from a specific to a general audience. I have almost no interest in the political / cultural pundit blogs and the free range journalism they represent, so most of the opining on blogs in the media doesn't really apply to what I do.

I imagine that when I take a teaching position I will scrap the blog as a simple matter of professional necessity. I wonder what form of writing will take its place.