- My SiteMeter stats for this week show I got 64 referrals to this blog from Blogger's NextBlog link. I also have three new followers. Hmm...I checked Blogger Buzz and I think this might have something to do with it.

- I went shopping for my cousin's baby shower today. Are wipes too practical of a gift? I saw all these cute baby blankets and toys that are sure to provoke an "Aww." Wipes, not so much.

The Franklins

I see these mountains nearly every day of my life, and yet after hiking this weekend I realized I don't really know them at all. It's something else to walk in them and experience them up close:

Can you see the cave?

And who knew there were so many rocks?

Ben Casnocha blogs about the earthquake in Chile. Glad he's OK.

I suppose emotional slumps are a natural part of life, like catching a cold a few times a year. Work is stressing me out lately. I'm on a more rigid schedule than I've been on in a while and I don't have the time I used to for those daily tasks of self-renewal like journal writing, exercise, praying, reading, spending time with friends. I used to consider those things important, now they're expendable. When I finally have a moment that I'm not busy, the neglect of those things catches up with me and it's like, whoa, where am I, I'm lost without a map. I can feel the rotting inside. Parts of me that used to be strong are not any longer.

It's a Saturday and I vowed to take some alone time today and not stay cooped up in the house doing laundry as I usually end up doing. I attempted to make plans with friends, those didn't materialize. I realized I hadn't bought a birthday card for my sister, so rushed to the store then to the post office. Then the afternoon, where I ended up taking a two-hour nap. Where did my serious self-reflection time go? I'm looking for the hour of enlightenment that will make me see things differently. Lately I feel like I'm just surviving things, not experiencing them. I'm a robot, there's no joy there.

Maybe this is a scheduling problem at its root, a matter of prioritizing those things that will help me not feel so overwhelmed. Maybe I need to quit the TV habit and stop working those extra hours. Maybe I just need to change my attitude about work and not take it all so seriously. A life where you don't have time to explore and ask questions and try to find the answers is not one worth living.

- Interesting link via Intersections: "Which country is most routinely miscovered in the U.S. press? There are clearly many candidates, but for me one stands out: Mexico...Journalists peddle a sort of drug-war pornography, salaciously and insatiably dwelling on the most lurid aspects of the trade: narcos, gangs, smugglers, pipelines, cells, mass graves, severed heads, torture chambers, dirty cops."

Comments are interesting, too. Author of the article Michael Massing responds: "Wouldn’t it be great if journalists devoted as much energy to assessing the drug war as they do to covering the drug traffickers?"

- This is what we're using the Internet for in 2010? Disturbing.

- Eric Blair was quite a guy.

Such a drama queen. Feeling better today. Will write more later...

I wake up from my stupor and the questions with no answers come back. What is right, what is wrong, what is true, what is false? Can I trust you? My head aches, my heart pounds, my palms sweat, angry words form inside, tears well up in my eyes. I say I want peace but I'm not finding it. Maybe I don't really want it. I'm ready to fight, not sleep, I'm ready to expose every lie that is masquerading as truth.

Good song for the drive home:
Oh! Darling, please believe me
I'll never do you no harm
Believe me when I tell you
I'll never do you no harm

Oh! Darling, if you leave me
I'll never make it alone
Believe me when I beg you
Don't ever leave me alone

When you told me you didn't need me anymore
Well you know I nearly broke down and cried
When you told me you didn't need me anymore
Well you know I nearly fell down and died

A quote from this article nicely sums up my attitude toward chocolate: "For me, eating chocolate is like an ongoing love affair -- to be enjoyed in small portions every day of the year. I don't pay attention to the legends about chocolate's health and aphrodisiac theories. There's just one good reason to eat quality chocolate: It tastes good."

Heather Armstrong on HGTV? Are you serious?

Blogging grows up

This article does a nice job of summing up the state of blogging these days:

Could it be that blogs have become online fodder for the — gasp! — more mature reader?
A new study has found that young people are losing interest in long-form blogging, as their communication habits have become increasingly brief, and mobile. Tech experts say it doesn't mean blogging is going away. Rather, it's gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.

Actually, I think blogging hasn't been "sexy" for quite a few years. And this blog, well, never, lol. According to the article, about 1 in 10 adults in America has a blog.

All of that rings true to Sarah Rondeau, a freshman at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.
"It's a matter of typing quickly. People these days don't find reading that fun," the 18-year-old student says.

A college students says 'people these days don't find reading that fun?' What kind of place is College of the Holy Cross?

"Five years ago blogging was a club," says (David) Sifry of Technorati. "There was this wonderful, delicious feeling of being able to talk privately or semi-privately with people who shared your interests. And there were few consequences of being able to share with your friends on a blog.
"I think we're seeing a deeper awareness of the perception of privacy and how that can affect your life if it's violated."

I definitely see all of this. I now tend to see blogging as a regular hobby, like stamp-collecting or short-story writing, not a social networking trend.

Also, the privacy thing is always on my mind when I'm posting something, and that definitely wasn't the case when I started my first blog in 2001.

And the original generation of bloggers who thought blogging was the coolest thing ever and have continued to post, well, we're all old now, no longer the college students or slacker young adults we once were.

But I like my blog, even if my fondness for it makes me seem old. Twitter annoys me, I'm losing patience with Facebook, texting does nothing for me. For a person (like me) who wants to do some real writing, I think there's really no better hobby for you to have.

- Got today off work and thank God for that.

- I never used to get what a big deal traffic alerts were until I started doing the 8-to-5 schedule thing. Wreck on the freeway = misery.

- Today's reading material: a short story by Nabokov and The Bible: A Biography.

- Bad idea not to collect the mail for four days in a row.