Sunday, April 14, 2013

Laziness and the Unsprung Spring

There's no denying it: I've been downright lazy when it comes to blog posting. Here we are in the middle of April, and I can count all of my 2013 blog posts on one hand...sadly, even a two-fingered critic could do the same.  But in my defense, both posts were pretty great.  This blog has been neglected for nearly three months--February and March flew by without any activity to speak of.

So what happened?  I think the grad school application process destroyed my motivation.  After all, that was the primary reason that my blogging streak ended in the middle of last summer.  When I graduated from college back in 2006, a similar fate befell my motivation to read.  Over the previous three years, I may have been the only guy on campus who read 99% of all the assigned reading in all of his classes.  When I left campus, I was so burned out that I didn't touch another book for a solid four years. If something couldn't be communicated in a series of entertaining and easy-to-understand pictures, I refused to learn about it.  "Reading for fun" became the most oxymoronic phrase in the English language.

Working on all those grad school essays and applications last summer and fall had a similar, though less extreme, impact on my writing.  I still did some writing here and there, but I couldn't convince myself to commit to the daily blog posting that I sustained in the early part of 2012.  After enduring so many evenings and weekends packed with un-fun writing of the worst kind, the prospect of sweet, sweet nothing was just too tantalizing to pass up.

I'm going to try to get the blogging started back up again.  No, I'm still not motivated enough to go back to the post-a-day schedule, but I'm going to ease back into it.  Why now?  With this "spring" weather here in Minneapolis, the better question is "why not now?"  Normally I would be spending my time outdoors in the sun am warmth, but at this point the mere thought of going outside makes me want to vomit.  It's April 14th, and this is the view from my patio:


Did I mention it's April 14th!?  It's still @%$# snowing!  This looks like November or December...or January...or February...or this past March, for that matter.  I heard on the news this morning that Minneapolis has had measurable snowfall for six consecutive days, which is the first time on record that's happened in April or something along those lines.  It's downright depressing.  The outdoors needs to take serious note of the calendar and get its act together...I just can't take this.

So here I am on a "spring" afternoon in mid-April, sitting at a keyboard instead of running outside or playing tennis.  My pasty Minnesota complexion isn't going anywhere in the near future.  The highest temperature in the seven-day forecast is 48°, so that layer of white covering the ground is going to stick around for a while.  April showers supposedly bring May flowers, but I'm guessing April blizzards kill May flowers.  The good news is that I'm leaving Minnesota in a few short months, but I could do without winter sticking it to me one last time before I leave.

Speaking of leaving, that brings me to my next topic: school...and the end of this blog.  I'll be starting school this fall--definitely a major life change, which should provide me with an incredible variety of new and exciting things to write about.  Unfortunately, I'll probably be too busy to actually write about them.  That's the way it always seems to go...when I have something interesting to write about, I just can't find the time to make it happen.  That's precisely why this blog's readers have been so consistently disappointed in the fourteen months of its existence--my writing has been a product of abundant free time!

However, despite the impending craziness of grad school, I'm going to at least try to maintain some blogging in the coming years.  But it's going to be on another blog.  I want to re-monitize my writing, which means switching to an AdSense alternative and bringing ads back to the borders around my writing..and I learned the hard way that I can't do that on a blog that blatantly talks about ad revenue, which Away From the Cubicle most certainly does.

So, as I move farther away from the cubicle (pun intended) than ever in the coming months, subsequent blog posts will be published on a new site.  There, I intend to provide the same type of random crap that you've come to expect here, along with riveting coverage of my move across the country and the transition back to life as a student.

With a future that combines two income-free years with writing lots of giant, financially-crippling tuition checks, I'll be going broke in rapid and spectacular fashion.  Fortunately for my weather woes, I'll be doing that in Berkeley, California.  And I've decided that there's no better place to read about a guy going broke in Berkeley than a blog titled Brokeley.  Check out the new blog!  It's not much to look at yet, but it has lots of potential...and no direct mention of ads.