When It's Time To Change You Got To Rearrange

Hi there.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that Leila may be right: Social media is killing our established means of communication.

In particular, Twitter and Facebook are to blame.  I'm not angrily pointing fingers, here; I love me some Twitter and Facebook.  I love them so much, in fact, that if I have something to say, most of the time, I'm going to say it on the former, which will auto-update the latter, and I can then add a comment, if necessary.  I email my friends less and less, because pretty much all of my friends are engaged in one or both of the aforementioned means of communicating with me.  I post to my lists still less, because (see previous statement).  If I care about you or you care about me, it's pretty likely that you know exactly what I'm up to at any given time.  I won't send you a Christmas newsletter, because all of you have been experiencing my life as I choose to share it as it happens, so my lazy ass isn't going to have to try to sit down and compose it all into paragraph form and print it off onto fancy poinsettia paper and lick stamps and gather your addresses and make the excruciating walk to the mailbox and lift the million pound little flag on the side of it, and then trudge back uphill barefoot in the snow to my front door.  If your address has an @ sign in it, we're good.

I'm okay with that.

Most of the time.

The thing that hangs over my head is this blog: Yes, this very blog that you're reading right now.  I almost never write for this blog these days - in fact, the last time I put anything here at all was 8 months ago, and even that was copied and pasted from Facebook.  Hand me my cane and let me whack you with it for a second: I've been blogging since before blogging was really a "thing".  Back then my blog posts were written in notepad, and uploaded via FTP. The Internet Archive's earliest record of previous iterations of this site dates November 11, 1996.  That's before my kids were born, before I got married, before I moved across the country.  I was 22 years old, then.  That's just what the Wayback Machine has on record - my first ever 'blog' was a Doom fanpage, circa 1994 or so.

Anyway, point is, this blogging thing is something I've been up to for 15  years.  That feels like a damn long time (and I guess it is).  So when I consider that maybe I should close up shop and let this go, it seems like a good idea.  But, I can't.  It's like the awful holey clothing that my husband is so totally not allowed to wear but unwilling to part with.  It's packed up and in the attic, but he's just glad to know that it still exists, even if he doesn't get to use it.  That's how this blog is, for me.  It's here if I need it.

So, maybe I'll post more often, and maybe I won't.  I'm making some changes to the way that I interact with the Internet Nation: For example, I've started a Twitter account that is open to the world (that's it over there on your right).  I've changed my email address to one that is FirstnameLastnameOtherlastname@, instead of mynxzilla@ - because I started to feel ridiculous having a screen name email address at 35 years old.  I didn't even realize that I was feeling weird about it until I found myself dreading having to give the address to teachers and school administrators for the kids, or when trying to spell it out over the phone to doctors or whomever.  I found myself explaining, and making excuses, and just generally feeling pretty dorky.

Those two changes happened last week.  I'm pretty sure they're going to be the only changes, too, but I can't say for absolute certain.  I'm going to keep my Facebook account and my primary Twitter account locked down, because I like to know for sure who has access to certain things, and who doesn't.  But as far as this blog goes, it's going to stay, I think.  Maybe you'll even hear from me, now and again.

Now get off my lawn.