I think I've forgotten how to blog

I can manage serious pre-planned posting like the wedding story (albeit intermittently) but I've not done regular off the top of my head blogging and thoughts for ages. Little things that occur to me go usually turn into tweets. Big philosophical/anxiety/depressed thoughts go into emails to my husband (mostly) and are too painful to share publicly. (Mostly they're momentary panics which I don't necessarily want to be on the interwebs for the rest of time. :) So that leaves, er, not sure.

I do have things to say sometimes. I think I could do with the discipline of writing more. If only to get in practice for the dissertation writing that IS GOING TO HAPPEN this year. So I thought I'd try.

It occurs to me that different places/means of writing have different psychological weight or depth of meaning to me. I'm supposed to be writing a list of things I want to talk about at a meeting with my supervisor on Friday (hence the procrastination of blogging). I could write this however I want. However. Typing into a Word document (well, the Open Office equivalent, I am a Mac person, after all) is too definite for notes. I have to mean what I say on a properly laid out page. Writing on paper is less scary, especially in biro. It's a scribbled note, noone expects it to look finished and the words are therefore less final, more tentative. I can be tentative in biro. Probably more so in pencil. The computerised equivalent is TextEdit. I find myself using TextEdit a lot to make notes on papers I'm reading, or to-do lists, or notes to myself. My desktop is littered with them. They're the computer equivalent of the reams of scribbled notes that are the precursor to a first draft - some complete sentences, mostly scraps, nagging questions, instructions to myself. It intrigues me that I find the scribbled note, in hard or soft form, easier to write than the finished paragraph, or at least anything that gives the appearance of a finished piece.

I think it's about confidence. If I don't have confidence it what I'm writing, I'm reluctant to commit it to something that looks finished. So, if you find me writing on newspaper in wax crayon, then I've lost it completely and have no confidence in my work. Although, at least I'd be writing. So maybe, even if it's a displacement activity, blogging is a good sign.