The One Where I Come Back

I've spent the last two days in a self-imposed quarantine brought on by the onset of the worst allergy attack I've had in years, with a case of some form of conjunctivitis thrown in for good measure. This area is slowly breaking down my defenses, one by one! I knew it was a bad place for allergies, but this borders on the absurd.

As my red Hulk eyes have slowly returned to normal thanks to some lovely eyedrops from my new doctor, I've done what I normally try to do in sickbed situations: read, work on my website, and try to decide the best strategy for getting these drops to stay in my eyeball. It's been a silver lining for me, because I've finally taken the time to do these necessary upgrades.

The other silver lining - nay, the platinum lining - in all this is that, as I manually transferred the lost entries, I realized how much I missed writing and blogging in general. I scanned through some of the highest points for Ramble On, some posts that I was really proud of. Sure, I kept up with my Flickr posts fairly regularly over the last few months, but that's not the same (and even that dropped off here lately). I think it was a snowball effect that kept me away: first it was the usual suspects in grad school, database errors, and travel. Before I knew it, I was making excuses not to post until I had time to fix everything, and as you might have guessed, that time did not come.

Subconsciously, though, I was making another realization: I just wasn't happy with the quality of what I was able to post. When I didn't even feel like really commenting on the tragedy that was April 16, I knew something was amiss. As many of my friends and colleagues demonstrated, writing can be a form of healing. I suppose that after so many "I promise I'll post more" posts and high-level recaps that never get fleshed out, a blog gets stale, and nothing will kill it quicker.

Well friends, I will not make a promise I cannot keep about posting frequency, but I will say that I have re-discovered how much this outlet means to me. It's good to be back.