What I Did on my Summer Vacation
Monday, September 10th, 2007For a few days now, I’ve been pondering how best to explain the excessively long absence from my blog … but I’ve finally reached the conclusion that there is no good way to explain it.
Sometimes, when you’re apologizing for something you should have done but didn’t, you might have a perfectly valid excuse. Sometimes your excuse is a little half-assed and lamebrained. And sometimes you have no excuse at all.
In my case, I think it’s probably a bit of all three.
If I tried, and if I really wanted to, I could fill long pages with detailed explanations of my summer, which actually included just about everything but a vacation. I could tell you about all the up-and-down-and-inside-out emotions of getting my daughters ready to go off to the University of Michigan, where they are now in their third week, and quite happily ensconced, thank you very much. I could tell you about the craziness in my day job, the way a usually quiet season when not much happens in the news business became instead a feverish hell of breaking stories and special meetings. I could tell you how I worked myself to a point that felt dangerously close to exhaustion or collapse, and how, when I wasn’t working, I didn’t have much energy or enthusiasm left over for much of anything else — blogging least of all. I could tell you a lot, but it wouldn’t really serve any purpose, and frankly it all sounds kind of depressing when you say it out loud or write it down.
But here’s the thing: it wasn’t really a depressing summer at all. It was just busy. It was a roller coaster. It was, well, life.
So now we know. Life isn’t just what happens when you’re busy making other plans; it’s what happens when you should be blogging.
For now, I’m back. I’m reading and writing and working and playing and trying to make sure that I carve out time for all those things that got swept aside, or merely ignored, over the past few months.
And I’m blogging.
Wow. You know what? It feels really, really good to be here.