"What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand. What matters is that the Flaming Lips’s new album is ravishing and I’ve listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people."

From an essay on "selling out" by Dave Eggers, reposted on caterina.net

I've been having the urge to blog lately, in the sense that I have things I want to get off my chest, and writing may be the only way I can truly do so. I've stopped writing for the most part. What is the point? No one reads this anyway. There is no utility to personal writing, at this point in my life. My time is better spent doing just about anything else -- learning computer skills, doing research for work, calling up a friend, watching a TV show or movie, reading a book, cleaning the house, learning another language.

I ask myself, how did I have so much time to blog when I was in college, and so little time to write now? Well, to put it bluntly, I didn't have a life. I didn't have a real job. I didn't have a boyfriend. I didn't have many friends to hang out with since I was so shy. I had summers off.

Writing was always a hobby, it was never about utility, never about wanting people to read what I wrote and say something nice about it. It was never about getting page views. It was never about getting paid. It was really one of the purest things I've ever done. I did it because I loved it, because it was an outgrowth of the person I was. Pure self-expression.

School is never pure like that. Work is NEVER like that. Even friendships and romantic relationships are often about tit for tat and social survival. But writing I poured myself into, and out of it I got ... a feeling, I guess, a feeling of well-being, of understanding, of putting something out there in the ether. Perhaps a feeling of satisfaction when I wrote something I felt was truly meaningful. Out of my blog I also got a few email pals and that was worthwhile.

I've investigated thoroughly the possibility of writing for a living and it just seems, from what I've read, that the outside world seems to agree with my current conclusion, that writing isn't worth much. A lot of people want to write, and many of them want to write so badly that they will do it for little or no money. A lot of people do write books, and there are a lot of books out there that don't get read. There are a lot of blogs out there. Most of them are a lot better than this one. Do I need to add to those numbers? Really? Does anyone care? No. Would anyone miss me if I never wrote another word? No.

Do I have something to say? I've read books that have so much to say about life and are so good that I feel like I demean language itself every time I start a blog post. I never say anything useful just going around in circles with these musings about life. But does everything have to have a price assigned to it?

I'll publish this and then decide tomorrow if it was worth taking the time to write or was a complete waste of time.