2001-01-03 - 23:59:02

Home on the Web

Like I said in my last entry, I'm going to be talking about my three Resolutions. In typical screwed up fashion, I'm starting at the bottom.

I have to admit that so far, my resolutions have been just talk. Here's an example of what I mean: one of my resolutions was that I would take better care of Uberhamster, my little home on the Web. I started writing this on January 3, but I really did most of the writing nearly ten days later.

I made the resolution for a reason, I want to get back into updating here on a near-daily basis again. Of course, the big question is: where am I going to get the time to do that??

Looking at a lot of other people's diaries, I get the distinct impression that nearly everyone writes a lot faster than I do, and that the writing is a lot easier for them. A couple times I've seen online journalers say that they only have fifteen minutes to update, and yet they seem to produce about two typewritten pages. This just boggles my mind. Some of my longer entries here in Uberhamster have taken me an entire day to write, literally.

While I think that I have written some good things and done some valuable work on myself, I need to make writing here not so strenuous. Some of the online journalers that I admire the most are the ones that seem to have a direct pipeline from their hearts to their keyboards. For me, my damned monkey-mind keeps getting in the way. My syntax gets jumbled, my ideas get confused. I have things I want to say, and I know what I mean, but I can’t seem to find the words. I thought that it would get easier as time went on, but it hasn't.

I've learned so much about myself here, but the work on myself is just that: work. Damned hard work.

But who said life was easy?

I also get the impression that a lot my hard work is for naught. I use too many words to get at simple truths, things that are probably obvious to you people out there reading. Sometimes I feel a little dim.

A lot of times, at the end of the day I feel just too damn dumb and tired to write.

But all of these are excuses. And no matter how good they sound, the basic fact is, when someone clicks here they'll see an update that is days old. They'll find another Diaryland diary that looks like nobody cares about. Good intentions don't get entries written.

So, where's my motivation? What caused my energy to flag?

My commitment to daily entries ended around the time the first Diaryland Survivor contest ended. Is that what knocked my train off the rails? Or was it simply that I now had too many real life distractions (most of them pleasant) to keep me gazing at the world through a computer screen.

Although there might be a simpler explanation: all the time I'm spending on the online game Planetarion. I'm trying to remember when I started playing the game in earnest, and it might have been around the time DL Survivor ended. That may be the real drain on my motivation. I don't know how much longer I can keep playing Planetarion though: it seems inevitable that the game's creators, in an effort to make the game "fair" for inept players, will come up with an innovation that makes the game unplayable for me.

Sometime around that time I also stopped following most of the other diaries I had been reading regularly. I MEANT to keep following them, but it just was hard to find the time to do so.

Which brings up another thing that I am dissatisfied with: I feel that I have not been a good host here. I seldom reply to the emails and posts I get in my Analyzer and Guestbook.

An aside here: I know that my Guestbook acts funny. It is hard to read and hard to post in. There is something wrong with the domain that's hosting it, which explains all the "Page Not Founds" that people get. I don’t know what I can do about that since such things are a mystery to me. I seem to be able to get into the guestbook after my fourth or fifth try, but I would imagine that many people will give up before that. All I can say is: keep trying! Eventually you'll get in.

So, I am dissatisfied with the amount of attention I've been paying Uberhamster, and by inference all of you, my audience. Believe me, I'm aware of how my hit count has been slipping over the last month or two.

But I'm not really here for the hit count, (Right! That's what EVERYBODY says!) although I do seem to need an audience to have the writing mean something. I still think that there is a lot of value I can get out of this journal. I think I'm still looking for my voice, and I think I still have a lot of stories to tell. There's still a lot of work to be done.

So here is what I propose to do. I want to do at least two entries a day until I get caught up to the "present day" which as I'm wrapping this up is January 12. And I'll start answering those emails and posts, honest!