I've been thinking about blogs lately, and about how maybe I hate them. Ok! I'm kidding! I don't hate blogs, despite the fact that I read very few of them and have been having a bit of a love/hate relationship with my own recently. Why? A few reasons. For one thing, I had a talk over email recently with a family friend and accomplished journalist about the whole act of writing blogs, for the general public and for free, and how it's a little bit of a strange, and possibly insane, endeavor. He shared with me the wonderful Samuel Johnson quote, "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." Which is a great, albeit slightly depressing, way to look at things. I was like, "Yeah, totally, money!" and then hung my head in sorrow when I realized how very, very much I write for exactly zero dollars.

Because, you guys, I have zero dollars projects piled up in the annals of my to-do lists like nobody's business, which is precisely why I haven't done a lot of the things I've promised people I'd do. I enthusiastically tell them I will write things, and read things, and edit things and collaborate on things - because I really want to do those things, from the bottom of my heart, only to be reminded of my reality from week to week. That I have to concentrate on the things that I am paid for during Nora's afternoon naps and the one day a week she is at daycare. Also, vacuuming. I've gotten really into vacuuming.

I scold myself a lot for doing things like watching TV with J at the end of a long day, instead of trying to further my career. But I'm not sure I'm being fair to myself when I think like that.

However - HOWEVER - after a couple weeks of sulking about how maybe I've put my best stuff out there for free on the stupid Internet and how people should pay me tons of money, I don't know what happened, but I kind of got over it. Yeah, I do still want my writing in honest-to-God print because, I don't know, I like print, call me old fashioned. And yeah, I am gonna send my stuff out to publications with check-writing capacity in a guerrilla warfare type attack, but the stuff I've done for free - vomit alert - makes me a better person. And yes, it is better and more worth it than watching TV at the end of the day.

But I still want to rent the entire series of "Battlestar Galactica," J, you're not getting out of this. Stop getting documentaries about birds and environmentalism and put it on our Netflix queue.

Thoughts on it all? The Internet? Print? Having a blog? Writing for the pure passion of it? Please share your comments, and I promise to contribute to the conversation this time. You can consider that another summer goal.