Repost Sunday: Blogging Has Already Consumed My Life

I rerun some of my older posts on Sundays as a way to highlight stories that you may have missed. Just think of it as 'thought recycling' and a day off. This was originally posted July 24, 2006. It's weird rereading this now because I will write my 100th post later in the week. Hopefully I can think of something appropriate enough for the 100th post celebratory extravaganza...or maybe I'll just take that day off to celebrate.

Until I began doing it myself, I didn’t realize how popular blogging has become. I also didn’t realize how much time it can take up, which is why this little ditty is about how blogging has consumed my life. I haven’t even been doing this a month yet and most of my waking and non-waking hours (I guess that would be all of them) are spent on some aspect of my blog. If I was a famous novelist it might be ok, but I write 4 paragraphs essentially about nothing on a daily basis and fret over it 24/7.

At least I’m not alone. I read that the Surgeon General has lobbied Congress to declare the act of blogging to be potentially habit forming. The Surgeon General’s office estimates that every minute of every day one-third of our population is engaged in composing or reading a blog. The number of people thinking about a blog in the same time span is assumed to be equal to the populations of China and Needles, California combined.

My blog threatens to change the basic framework of my entire life. My workday is spent discussing either my previous post or potential new ideas with fellow co-workers. What makes that so pitiful is the fact that my workers don’t care about the blog’s content and 9 out of 7 co-workers polled didn’t even know I had a blog. Even more disturbing is the fact that the majority of those respondents have no idea who I am and aren’t sure why I keep showing up everyday.

At home, my 4-year old twins have stopped saying “hi Daddy” when they see me and now ask “watcha gonna blog ‘bout tonight Dad?” When my neighbor’s cat was accidentally run over last week, I got in trouble for taking pictures and pushing people out of the way while yelling “I can’t believe this happened tonight, I had nothing to blog about…until now, baby!”

If you are kind enough to still be reading this blog and contemplating beginning one of your own, take heed. I can no longer just enjoy or be affected by life, I have to approach it thinking about how it will fit into written form and whether or not I can find a cool little graphic to accompany it. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Michael and I’m a Blogaholic.