“Do you ever think about a life that doesn’t involve the Web?”
That’s a paraphrase of a question a friend of mine asked me a couple of months ago (right around the last time I updated the blog, I guess). We were talking about career stuff—her career more than mine, because she was feeling a little restless and dissatisfied and was contemplating doing something else with her workday. For me, since I’ve just landed in this new career that very much involves the Web, the answer was sort of no, because I love what I’m doing and want to keep doing it for the foreseeable future, at least the immediately foreseeable future. (The unforeseeable future involves me winning the lottery and taking lots of naps with the cats.)
But I know what she means. At the very least, I’d say that the love affair is over for me and the Web. It’s been heading that way for a long time, but it’s really reached a turning point this year, now that I spend my days thinking about the smallest particulars of how we interact with the interface. That’s still fascinating to me…but I’ve kind of separated myself—the observer/analyst—from the regular Web user. Not totally, because I am still a heavy user of the Web, of course. But enough so that I don’t want to spend more time than I have to sitting in front of a computer and looking at Web pages.
Which means that when I get home, the last thing I want to do is go to the basement and spend time with the iMac, even though it is a completely fabulous machine and a pleasure to use. Nor do I want to take my work laptop out of its bag for any longer than is strictly necessary. (Having a work laptop, I’ve discovered, makes it really hard to maintain any sort of boundary between work and home; basically, when it’s busy at work, I just work all the time, regardless of time of day or day of week.) I notice that my friends seem to be tending toward the same conclusion: I get less personal e-mail and mailing list e-mail than ever before. I think there’s a degree of Internet fatigue that has set in for all of us. It’s still an indispensable part of our lives, but the thrill, eet ees gone.
And that makes it tough to keep up a blog. But I don’t want to give this thing up, either. For one thing, I like having a place to talk to myself (other than my car, that is), and for another, I’ve already paid for the next year of Web hosting. 
And I’m pretty sure the urge to write is going to strike me again one of these years, even if for the moment I’m really enjoying not being a writer or editor for the first time in more than 15 years. Plus, put simply, I just like having a blog. So I don’t think I’m going to scrap the thing, but I need to figure out a way to update it regularly enough to make it an actual blog, rather than a moribund entity that I occasionally visit. If I ever get the stupid wireless access point that I paid a fortune for up and running, my plan is to post something every day, even if it’s just a sentence or two. But knowing me, that’s a pretty lofty goal. I don’t know, I think maybe I like the idea of blogging more than I like the actual practice…which is pretty typically me.
So if anyone has any clever ideas for how to keep the thing going on a more or less consistent basis, please tell me. Otherwise, it will just take work, I guess. And I hate work.