An update for people who like to read my blog

Just, an update on my “blogging” life, kind of.

 

I have been the BIGGEST slacker for quite a while. Observe…my own statistics of how often I have blogged for the past years.
2011: 156 blog posts (and this blog started on February 13^th)

2012: 91 blog posts

2013: 17 blog posts

2014: 7 blog posts

2015: 2 blog posts so far (math projection: At this rate, I will end up doing 6-9 posts by the end of this year)

 

Now, one could argue that it’s because in 2012, Abrielle was born, and in 2014, Alsea was born.

 

However, there’s another thing that’s more difficult to admit: I am a video gamer. This blog’s topics were originally “Jesus, sociology, and video games”. And I got addicted to a little site called Trueachievements that has these challenges that you can do with achievements, like see how long of an at-least-one-achievement-a-day streak you can have (I am at 357 days right now), or drop your completion percentage as much as possible in one week and then catch up for the rest of the year (I dropped it 3.88 percent by adding 38 games and now I only need 308 more achievements before I can catch back up), or the new “Leap Frog” event where, in order to stay in the game, you have to get 1 achievement one day, and then two achievements the next day, and then three achievements…

 

Now, despite that last paragraph being the longest paragraph of this whole post, I actually have not sacrificed my whole life to video games. My 168-hour week involves about 45 hours of work, 5 hours of game night (youth ministry event), 3 hours of church, about 12 hours of wifey time (Friday is usually my day off and then we have the “nightly debrief” where we talk about what happened that day), 55 hours of sleeping. 3 hours of Grandpa time, probably about 14 hours of Abrielle/Alsea time (my daughters), about 7 hours reading stuff and about 8-10 hours of video gaming a week. And yeah, I spend some time on Facebook and Youtube, I would say 10 hours?

 

Those were all weekly estimates.

 

But the point that I’m slowly getting at is this: For 20% legitimate reasons, and for 80% not-so-legitimate reasons, I’ve let my blog slide. And I want to renew my commitment to blogging and typing.

 

Two things I have let stop me from doing this.

1. The above legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and…
2. Me choosing, a while back to blog primarily in “series” format. Which used to work…but now I feel trapped by it. Which is noone’s fault but my own.

 

While this format would happen naturally, sometimes I would think “I want to start a new series!!!” and then, when I came to fleshing out the concept with words, I would run into one of the following problems.

1. The topic is something I feel is necessary, but it’s too depressing/frustrating that typing about it made me angry…(e.g. Westboro Baptist Church)
2. The topic is something I wanted to make a series out of, but the more I typed, the more I realized that the “series” was just me repeating the same thing over and over again, in different words (e.g. Freedom from Freedom)
3. I want to make a statement, but I’m unwilling to make the time it takes to do the research to back it up, so it becomes just an opinion I can’t defend as well as I would like (most parenting thoughts that I have).
4. I just get bored, but I still feel like I have to finish. But, the passion is gone.

 

Anyway, here is what I am doing to free myself from this.

1. I have a separate word document with all my blog ideas on the back burner, as well as some incomplete blog posts. I’m going to entirely erase it to remove the pressure.
2. I’m not going to complete the Westboro Baptist blog series at this time (because it’s taking me too long to expose the presuppositions of their position…they are too many). I’m also not going to add any more posts to “Freedom from Freedom” (I’ve said what I needed to say, and I believe that the concept seems to hold true everywhere…no need to continue bringing up examples).
3. Although this blog originally didn’t have Taekwondo as one of the topics, I think it’s going to start. As the prospect of school ownership comes closer and closer, I would like my peers, my seniors, and my students and families to get a peek inside the way I think. That way, my peers and seniors can challenge me and my thinking, and my juniors can know what crazy tomfoolery they’ve signed up for. Poor souls. (Simply put, what kind of school owner I will be is simply on my mind more, so blogging makes sense)
4. I plan on doing many more one-and-done blog posts.
5. New name of the site. Nobody calls this site “While we’re here.” They call it “Carson’s blog thingy.” The problem is that I am notoriously bad at creating things out of thin air. And that includes names. However, because taekwondo is my career, something I’m passionate about, the name change kinda makes some But there’s gonna be more on the name change in another post.

 

It’s time to re-juice my blogging efforts.

 

Next post: Out of all the frickin’ names I could have chosen for the blog post, why that?