Good morning folks. I share with you a picture of Mollie… defending her spot. If you do not know anything about Mollie, she is the weirdest cat in our household and even though she has been with us over a decade at this point… she is still super skittish. She can be extremely sweet at times, but mostly… she just fails at being a cat in most ways. She gets stuff stuck in her head and right now… she lives on this pad in the bedroom. For years she lived on a pad beside me in my office, but for whatever reason she has switched locations. So much so that if we do not get up from the bed fast enough, she will come scream at us until we make the bed and put the pad in the center of it like she wants. She does not sleep with us at night, even though we leave the pad on the bed between us.
She is an incredibly smart cat for as weird as she is. For example if I am sitting on the toilet… and she has decided that her water dish in the kitchen is not full enough… she will hop up on the bathroom counter and start furiously headbutting the water faucet. She has figured out a way to communicate that water comes from the tap and she needs some. I’ve turned on the bathroom faucet and she does not want to drink it from that… so it is clear that she is using the faucet as a placeholder for her water bowl. I love her muchly, but all attention has to be on her terms. If I dare to pick her up, she will freak the fuck out so I just stopped over the years. Now if she crawls over onto me… it is okay because she started the action but she will also still bolt at moments notice when things get too real for her. That is the thing with cats and honestly people too… you figure out how to work around their little idiosyncrasies.
I’m in a weird place right now where I am finding it hard to summon forth the desire to blog in the morning. For a few months I have missed at least one post each week. Then last week I pretty much took the entire week off. It isn’t like I have swapped blogging for some other form of communication. I’ve been pretty radio silent on social media as well. I think I just feel like I don’t have much to say that means anything. Maybe this is a side effect of everything that is happening in the larger world right now… or maybe it is tied to the fact that after five years of being fully report… we are being summoned back into the office one day per week, but it is the same day for everyone. Maybe it is just that I feel like I am not really doing anything anyone would actually care about. I’ve been blogging for sixteen years… and semi-daily for twelve of those… and it is like I have run out of things to say.
None of this bodes terribly well for the impending arrival of Blaugust, when I am supposed to be a hype machine for blogging as a concept. I have done absolutely NOTHING yet to plan for this… and July 8th is when I have to start going back into the office on the regular… so that is not going to help at all either. Blaugust is this thing that I am known for… but I feel like a bit of a fraud right now since I struggle to type words into a box on my screen these days. Again this is probably not the sort of post that I am going to promote widely, because “Bel has an existential crisis” is not exactly great material for social media. So if you happen to stumble onto this… I guess that means you are a regular reader and I apologize for letting you down. I have no clue what I am doing right now, or how best to do it.
You’re super consistent and have little to prove. Pushing through some fatigue is a great way to get burn out and loose more time than a break would have cost.
I think if you need to take a break you should take a break. You’ve surely done your share for Blaugust and a lot more. Last year quite a few people expressed some concerns that it was all getting a bit much for various reasons. It wouldn’t hurt to let it go a little low-key for a year and I’m sure someone would step up to guide it through. Not that I’m volunteering – I was planning to take a lower-key approach this year, myself!
As for running out of things to say, I definitely feel that. I keep having to check back to see if I’m repeating myself these days and I usually am. I work on the principle that if I have to check, though, it’s pretty unlikely anyone else is going to remember. I think we all mostly repeat ourselves all the time after we hit our thirties, anyway, so why should blogging be any different?