Au Revoir?

In a shocking move, Ditzy Genius recently bid farewell to her readers, “probably permanently.” Can this be? Can one of the bloggers I've read so regularly and enjoyed so completely really be calling it quits? Of course I hope she decides to return sometime soon, but at the same time, I also understand that she may have good reasons for taking a break—even a permanent one. I've thought about making the same move probably once a month since starting this thing, and more frequently since starting year-two of law school. It seems common for “law school blawgs” to fizzle before their authors make it through the process, and I've recently had glimpses of why that is. I'm guessing it's something about the demands of year two, the lack of novelty in the process, the priorities turning elsewhere. (Not that any of these reasons necessarily played any part in DG's decision; this is just my own perspective.) But as the process changes, so, too, can the blog. At least I hope it can. The dominant content of aihas changed several times over the last two years (at least I think it has), and that's fine with me. I know I lose readers and gain readers when my focus shifts from one main topic to anther (from leaving grad school/thinking about law school, to the democratic primary process, to 1L of law school, to the sort of transitional grab bag period of the present), but that's how it goes. Maybe somewhere around year two is adolescence for blogs? You know, the difficult years, the growing pains, the identity crisis? Whatever. I still enjoy it, so I'll continue for now.* Still, I understand making a different decision, so best of luck, DG! I know many of us will miss you while you're gone, and we'll be thrilled if you decide to return! *I may have mentioned this before, but to me this blog has become a sort of hobby, a project, a toy. Specifically, I think of a certain stereotype of a man who has a wife and kids and job and responsibilities (which I don't; I'm just painting a picture here), and in every way seems like a nice and normal guy, but you go in his garage and there you find a piece of junk old car that doesn't run and quite probably never will. Yet, whenever this guy gets a free weekend or even a few spare hours on a Wednesday night, he'll either be playing around with the car (“restoring” it), or talking to friends about where to get parts or what modifications to make or whatever. So the car takes up his spare time and money and energy and imagination, and it might drive his friends and family crazy except that they know he enjoys it and it keeps him from getting into trouble doing something else with those resources. So this blog is my piece of junk old car in the garage, my hobby and distractio. Except my piece of junk runs; I can take it for regular drives. Sure, there's always some tinkering I'd like to do under the hood (for example, last weekend I eliminated the annoying bug where all archive links turned into a link to a book about Howard Dean on Amazon; no, that was never intentional), but when I'm short on time I can also just take it for a spin around the block w/a quick post about whatever. I mean, if I ever have a house with a garage where I think I'm going to be able to stay for a good little while, I'll probably have a real piece of junk old car in there to play with. There's actually a 1972 MGB Roadster in Montana that would fit really nicely in my garage if I had one. But, in the meantime, this is my ambivalent hot rod. Perhaps the analogy only works inside my head.

Posted October 5, 2004 12:13 PM | 2L meta-blogging