2014

Greetings and salutations for the first time in 2014!

As you might have noticed, 2013 wasn't really The Year of The Blog for me. To be truthful, there were more than several occasions where I contemplated just hitting the private button and leaving this little internet portal to my soul to collapse upon itself. Why, you ask? A combination of factors, mostly: it's a bit of a timesuck; it's a bastion of rampant narcissism; it's embarrassing to think of people I went to high school with finding it and reading about my thoughts and my weight; I maybe had a glass or two of wine one night and sent the link to some family members (like my dad, who is the actual writer in the family in that he is gainfully employed rearranging words) and, perhaps most importantly, because I had completely lost any interest in or passion for it.

Anyone with a blog knows the pressure it brings -- it's a constant battle between, "give the people what they want!" (mixed, of course, with the awareness that "the people" is a group limited to a very small group of IRL friends and strangers of the Twitter universe) and, "why would I want to put this on the internet? Who cares about it? Does it serve some kind of need aside from my own incessant need to ponder the world, and myself, to within an a hair's breadth of insanity?" These questions have been driving me nuts over the past year. I have a veritable mortuary of posts sitting in my drafts folder, some gasping their last breaths with hope that I'll eventually come back and others that made it two stellar sentences only to be declared dead on arrival. All are a mere finger-click away from disappearing into the Internet Abyss forever.

But enough of that.

As I mentioned, 2013 wasn't the Year of The Blog. It was, however, the Year of a lot of other aspects of my life. The Year of Putting My Foot Down. The Year of South Beach. The Year of Grant Proposals. The Year of My First Marathon. The Year of My Ten-Year High School Reunion. The Year of My Wisdom Teeth.

Though they might not seem like much, those were all very significant events in my life, for a variety of reasons. Essentially, it was a year of both setting and pushing boundaries, which is something I have struggled with for a very long time. I faced some of my biggest fears in 2013, which is more than I can say about 2012 and all that I can hope to continue into 2014.

With that, I bid you all a Happy New Year, and promise to check back in with some regular life updates soon!