After thinking about it for a long time, I've decided to stop keeping a journal here. It's been a good run, and with a few brief hiatuses, I've been writing here for eleven and a half years, which isn't bad. I've enjoyed it, and I think some good writing has come out of it, but it was time.

I debated giving a list of reasons, because there are a few, but here's why I'm closing the door on this:

• The biggest reason is a lack of time. I have a new job, a long commute, and a long-form journal takes time and energy. I drive to work, so I can't type on a subway or bus. And after a day in the office, I usually don't want to run to a computer for a few more hours.
• I've had a great lack of focus on what I should be writing here. Some of the longer entries are great and I love doing them, but they are always very inspired and don't happen at the drop of a hat. Some entries are just news and random observations, which are more blog-like and I hate, although I sometimes feel a need to make them. If I was restoring a sailboat or backpacking across China or running a business or something like that, I can see the value in a daily journal that draws people into your project or quest. But I can't write "went to office for 8 hours / had burrito for lunch / American Idol is on tonight" 300 times in a row and consider it anything but a waste of my time.
• I'm running into more and more problems with having a log of my personal life available on google for the world to see. I feel a need to self-censor myself, because I can't mention this thing to my family or that thing to my employer or another thing to a specific person I pissed off or whatever else. The result is I come up with entries that are watered-down and worthless. And I don't get to write about the things I want to write about. I can think of at least a half-dozen major aspects of my life I can't even mention here. Yes, I could do a password-protected journal, but that's largely stupid. The people you are blocking eventually find out you are writing about them or about something and either get pissed that they aren't a special friend with a password, or they strongarm the password from someone else. I finished the third grade a long time ago; I don't want to revisit its politics.
• I've had dual identities for a long time, in the sense I had my 'real' work and my writing, and balancing them has always compromised both. If I kept my writing at anything other than a hobby, like model airplanes or stamp collecting, employers would feel I was not 100% committed. And if I didn't put my work on autopilot and spend some time thinking about my writing, I couldn't write to my fullest potential. There needs to be some balance, and I don't know what that is. But I know that working, writing, and keeping this journal is too much. And as much as it might make me sound like a sellout or wage-slave, I want my employer to know I am my job. And having a google-able archive of everything that isn't my job doesn't help.
• A minor rant: I think that journals and blogs have killed personal correspondence. Back in the old days, when I went to a party over the weekend and saw Doug talking to Joe or whatever else, I would email my friend in Indiana or Wyoming or San Jose and tell them about it. And they would write back their response. Now, I blog it, and I never hear back from anyone, except maybe a one-line comment. I used to write and hear from people every day, all the time, megs of email. What happened? People have gone passive, surfing the world of blogs like a big TV set, and don't want to interact with people anymore.

And that's that. I might be back in a month, I might move on to other projects. I still have a LiveJournal, and email is always welcome and encouraged. (first initial of first name, last name at this site dot com.)

-Jon (10/7/08)