Why I Haven’t Been Blogging by Erick P. '17
I, uh, don't really have an excuse
Behold, the first sentences of four different unfinished summer blog posts:
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On Commencement day, I almost got grabbed by police for getting too close to the front while both my friends met Tim Cook outside of the bathroom.
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So I bought some Ethereum at $7 and it’s worth $400 now…
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Looks like I decided to write something at a reasonable hour. NOPE! It’s 3:58 AM here in China.
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My birthday is in less than an hour, my bus leaves in less than an hour, I need to do laundry, and I’m still completely unpacked.
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Some say the cure to writer’s block is to have a nice cup of tea while listening to some tunes to get the mind flowing. I prefer to use themostdangerouswritingapp.com to force me to write walls of text and lose all of my progress if I stop typing for more than 7 seconds.
This works to cook up a first draft, albeit with a lot of misslepped words and grammar errors. I don’t like publishing half-baked work. I like to knead the doughy first draft text and focus it around my main points. I then flesh out my stories and mix in some transitions while trimming off the excess fat. Then I sprinkle in some seasoning and light thesaurusy-words and creativity for the right flavor. I bake my post to perfection and let it sit for about a day before I come back for one last revision. Finally, I add in any icing, pictures, and GIFs that make my post colorful and then publish it on the windowsill of the Internet for the world to see.
That’s what I usually do. But it’s been two months without posting and I’m going hungry. I guess I feel pressure from myself to make every post some long, well-thought-out piece about a very important event. I feel like every one of my posts needs to captivate, entertain, and leave the reader with some lesson. And that post has to relate back to MIT in some way. But my boss and the other bloggers reassure me that that is not the case. When I don’t feel like I’ve done something bloggable or I feel too busy/lazy to blog, I should circumvent those feelings by just “blagging” anyway. About anything. So I pushed myself to write up this post and put it out there to get the habit going again.
I will be posting more over the next month. And when I inevitably stop again because I get lazy or don’t feel like what I am doing is “bloggable”, I shall think back to my all-time favorite inspirational quote:
