When I first started blogging, all those years ago, I assumed that the act of blogging would serve as an outlet for my emotions. I thought there would be a cathartic release from sharing how I felt with anonymous strangers on the Internet. What I have found is actually the opposite--when times get bad, I tend to post less and less.

There are lots of reasons for this: Sometimes, the problems that I have are with people who read this blog. In my first year as a blogger, I wrote something about a friend that criticized how she handled a situation. Months later, she read what I had written, and reacted by cutting me completely out of her life. I was young and foolish, and I had a hard time negotiating those barriers between the public and private, and it cost me a friendship. Now that I am older and supposedly wiser, I try to deal with my problems in person rather than delving into the passive aggression that the internet fosters so easily. It doesn't always work, but at least it doesn't create any more problems.

I also don't write about the bad because committing it to words makes it real. I've owned a house for two and a half years now, and it is easily the most stressful thing that has ever happened to me: we've had carpenter ants, mice, sewage backups, a basement flood, plumbing problems, a roof leak, and lots of much more minor things. Writing about these events and the pure, unadulterated panic they entailed would actually have made things worse for me. (In fact, I can feel my blood pressure rising even now when I'm mentioning them in passing.)

So things have been quiet here lately, as I'm sure you've noticed. I had such a good posting record over the summer, and I completely blew it when I went back to work. I love my job, but it is both intense and stressful, and this year I am involved in a fair amount of extra-curricular stuff that is also intense and stressful: I've been negotiating a new collective agreement as part of my union. It has been practically a part-time job in and of itself since August (consuming 10-15 hours a week of my time). Things have taken a turn for the worse this; the administration has decided to cancel all future meetings, effectively ending negotiations for the time being. We get to file for conciliation soon, which means that my bargaining preparations will now be preparations for other things.

I've also been knitting my mom's sweater. I've promised her it will be finished for Christmas, and I intend to keep that promise. I think I hate the yarn, though.