The problems with blogging

I need to write. I really, really do. And I miss blogging a lot. It used to be a way to keep me writing. Instantly publishing and getting feedback. What could be better? It's the future. It has been the future for me since about 2003, but for some reason I turned back, experienced some kind of cataclysmic soul-transforming emptiness and lack of success, and here we are back at square one.

I've been having a few problems with blogging:

1. Everybody's reading this, baby. When everybody* started using internet, not just a few hunch-backed geeks and my closed circle of friends but also my mum, my spinster aunties, my work colleagues, my clients, the random dude I met at the coffee shop six months ago... I realised how important it was to maintain a fairly respectable, well-groomed online persona. Like suddenly everything I blogged would be down in history for the rest of eternity, so I'd better not say any bad words or talk behind people's backs or say anything that may be perceived as racist or discriminatory or complain about my work or in general say anything that may be bad in any possible way. This obsession with political correctness sort of crushed my desire to write, like suddenly it was just too much to be normal and polite in the virtual world as well as in the real one. This is an interesting problem that I will address in a future post. 
2. I have some language issues. That should be a good thing for a writer, as it creates many avenues to explore, but I have so much fear of delivering some sort of solipsistic hybrid navel-gazingly Spanglishized mud brew that I often end up not writing at all. 
3. Kind of related to #1 again, and I'm sure many people are experiencing problems in relation to this. What are the rules for online sharing? I'm sure I've broken all of them. I haven't tended to my blog in about 5 million years, I kept an outdated blog template going for as long as I could stretch it, I can't figure out what to do with my Picasa account, I have about 20 online profiles and none of them are consistent with each other, and then I've gone and switched my blog to another language probably alienating my 8 loyal readers for ever. Oh well, c'est la vie, everything is always changing, isn't it. In a world of constant flux, I've decided to keep my old blog address and the old content there too. But with a nice new tweetable, facebookable design that doesn't draw too much attention to the fact that I've been blogging for a decade and nothing has ever come of it.

*All right not everybody - the actual growth I've experienced has been from 4.1% of the world's total population in 1999 (when I first started sharing my writing online) to close to 35% of the world's total population at the moment... if you don't believe me do your research, I refuse to put appeasing blue links on those numbers to make you feel like they're legit!