what is blogging for?

Auntie Mame (for which my beloved grandma nicknamed herself) is entertaining enough and i’ve had a tough day… so why should i blog?

i think i partly want to be accountable to the world for having something to say. so much of life is reading what others write – in my life that is, at least for now as a phd – and i start to worry that outside of my narrow segment of academia, i might have little of value to say, or to share.

i also worry that someone might actually read this. might my advisors? what would they think that i have opinions about the academy (esp the one i’m at) that are not always positive?

but yet i’d like to show myself – by showing the narrow bit of the world that might read this – that i have more to me still than my program.

which of course i do. i must acknowledge that i have a full and lovely life, filled with friends and family and fascinating people and ideas and hobbies – what i don’t have enough of lately (or don’t take enough of) is time. time to explore, time to write, time to do! i’m always reading about how to do things yet spend so little time doing them. dammit!

but then i do do so much. i just do it so fast. or so often, or with so many people that i almost forget that it happened by choice.

Oh, how i love Mamie for namign herself after Auntie Mame. What a great woman.

Well I must be off. Off to do and not do and feel guilty about it nonetheless. Is guilt for non-doing a Catholic (Calvinist?) vestige, or a product of socialization to ambition and overacheivment? or is it my own neurosis. or bipolar disorder.