Yesterday I met my good buddy Jack for lunch at my old college hangout, The Pie Pizzeria. (The location is actually irrelevant to this entry; I just wanted an excuse to link to The Pie’s Web site. Make sure your speakers are on so you can experience the genuine ambience of the place.)

We talked of many things over our pepperoni slices, but the topic that stuck in my mind was blogging. I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject since Monday’s anniversary, about various aspects of the whole enterprise. I’ve questioned why I do this (it isn’t for the money, obviously) and what I get out of it (at first glance, not much). I’ve also questioned whether or not it’s worth the effort to continue doing it.

The fact is, blogging has a lot of liabilities. The biggest is the time required to keep churning out fresh content. Each entry takes me a minimum of thirty minutes to compose, and usually it’s more like an hour. The longer entries sometimes take all day to put together by the time I track down links I want to reference, produce the basic content, revise that and then proofread everything. (In case you haven’t noticed, proofing is usually the part where I get lazy…) That’s time I could spend on all kinds of other pursuits, not least of which is writing the novels and screenplays I’ve always told everyone I want to create. In addition, I’m not always certain that my three loyal readers are interested in the things that I write about. That’s not a criticism of you guys, it’s just an observation based on which entries generate comments. When I see entries without any comments, I often assume that those subjects failed to provoke any sort of response from my readers, and so I wonder if I should continue to write about those things, or if I simply didn’t write about them well enough, or if everyone was just busy the day I posted those entries. And then there is the constant risk of offending someone, and considering that the only readers I definitely know I have are my Real-World friends, that risk weighs heavily on me as I write. I always want to be honest and open about my opinions, but not at the expense of damaging friendships. It’s just not worth it, in the long run.

So why do I do this? And what the heck is “this” anyway? I know what it is not, for whatever that’s worth. Simple Tricks and Nonsense is not a journal or diary, like a lot of other blogs that people use to relate the daily happenings of their lives. I realized early on in my blogging career that I wasn’t entirely comfortable sharing a lot of intimate information with the whole wide world — I figure my close friends already have a pretty good idea of which demons drive me, so why make everyone uncomfortable by dwelling on them? Also, if I was doing Simple Tricks as a diary but leaving out all the insecurities and neuroses, what would that leave me? A list of mundane activities that are probably much the same as everyone else’s mundane activities, and those definitely wouldn’t be worth the effort to write about. No, this Web site is more like a newspaper feature column, a series of short (or not-so-short) essays on the esoteric subjects that somehow catch my interest. But what value is that, aside from (hopefully) entertaining the small handful of people who actually know the site is here?

Jack said over lunch that he uses his Web site — when he can find the time to update it, that is — as an exercise for maintaining writing skills that he otherwise has no cause to use. That isn’t my reason for blogging, though. I make my living as a technical writer, I have kept a traditional journal off-and-on over the years, and I do have other writing projects cooking all the time, so I don’t think I’m in danger of my writing abilities atrophying.

However, Jack’s remark and my subsequent thoughts as I tried to come up with a response to it, did finally lead me to the answer I’ve been looking for: I blog because this silly activity helps me crystallize exactly what my interests and opinions actually are.

That probably sounds weird — how could I not know what my own interests and opinions are? But if you think about it for a moment, I don’t think it’s such an unusual thing for a person to not really know what they’re all about. Anyone can throw out a position on some issue if they’re suddenly challenged, but how many of those positions are really well-reasoned and based on research and careful consideration, and how many are just off-the-cuff? By the same token, everyone has hobbies, and no doubt many people are passionate and well-educated about those things. But how many more people just kind of dither at various pasttimes and never really reflect upon them, or the reasons why they do those particular things? How many people, when introduced to someone new, struggle to come up with answers to the basic small-talk question, “So what do you do?” Maybe I’m unusual and most folks really don’t have problems answering that question, but I’m willing to bet that I’m not all that different from everyone else.

As I explained to Jack, keeping a private, offline journal didn’t help me answer the sorts of questions that I tend to ponder here on Simple Tricks. I wrote about many of the same things in my offline journals that I blog about here, but the knowledge that no one would ever see those writings except me and some hypothetical descendent tended to conspire against the process. I was free to just ramble on and on without ever coming to a point. Here in this forum, where I know my thoughts are going to be read by at least a few people, I’m forced to be more conscious of what I’m saying and where I’m going with something. I feel obligated to make a coherent argument for my opinions and to justify — or at least illustrate — my interests and tastes, rather than monomaniacally declaring them and calling it good. To use a cliche’d expression, I think Simple Tricks is helping me “find myself.” It’s definitely lending me some perspective on a lot of things, giving me the “Big Picture” view of myself that I often had trouble seeing in my offline journals.

In addition, my journals tended to be very negative in tone. I’m prone to depression and self-pity — it’s my nature, I’m sorry to admit — and private writings unfortunately allow those aspects of myself a little too much free reign. In my offline journals, I didn’t have any reason not to whine, complain, and feel crappy about myself. Here, where I again know that other people are looking, I am conscious of the need to keep those feelings restrained, at least a little, in order to keep my audience coming back. The end result, I believe, is a better overall attitude than I would have if I were constantly wallowing in the ennui-soaked pages of my “eyes-only” personal journal.

So, for me at least, this blog is a valuable emotional and psychological tool. For you folks out there in InternetLand… well, I don’t know what you’re getting out of this. A few minutes of distraction from your boring jobs, perhaps, or, as my friend Keith said in comments the other day, a way for my more distant acquaintances to stay in touch with me. Whatever your reasons may be for coming to this domain, at least now I have a better idea of my own reasons…