Laughing at the Pieces Will Never Die!

Lately, I've been feeling that Facebook has been killing my blogging.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've been feeling like Facebook is part of a sinister cabal conspiring to kill my blogging. I do short, quick updates there, and I don't throw things up here. It satisfies some of my need for certain types of communication--the targeted, friends-only kind--a little better than this li'l ol' blog does. And lacking something to take me out of the house every day, it's been something of a blessing. (Not to mention the work it's brought me.)

But that's not all that's making this blog slumber. Here's the rest of the cabal:

Shut-In: If I'm not out having adventures, there's no adventures to write about. Although to be honest, I probably should have written a little bit here about the explosion and kitchen fire.

BusyBusyBusy: There are times when I'm actually busier than I used to be, between looking for a job, looking for freelance work, and -- when I'm lucky enough to get it -- actually doing freelance work.

Scatterbrain: Trying to find work has made my brain something like an octopus -- lots of different tentacles reaching out to lots of different places. And while I still look at the news and comics blogs I used to surf, they're much tinier dots on my horizon.

The Great Comics Gerrymander: Not only am I not buying many new comics, but I also should be feeding Blog@Newsarama every once in a while. (Something will be up there from me again, soon.) So my comics writing here has been limited on two fronts lately.

Political Satisfaction: Jeez, Obama's President, and I'm pretty happy about how he's going about things so far. To save you all from a string of posts that are essentially, "Squee!" I'll probably only be writing about politics when something unusally good happens, or unusually bad, or if something strikes me as funny. (Yesterday, for example: I probably wouldn't have mentioned the second swearing-in if I hadn't thought of the "Oaf of Office" headline.)

Secrecy: Every now and again, I do some work on a writing project that isn't yet ready for me to talk about. So I don't.

Now, I have seen some interesting movies lately: the 1948 Powell/Pressburger ballet film The Red Shoes, and Michael Haneke's home-invasion thriller Funny Games (an American shot-by-shot remake of his decade old German version). I liked both quite a bit, although I couldn't recommend either film to everyone. (In the case of The Red Shoes, old romances don't float everyone's boat; on the other hand, as subversive and clever as it is, Funny Games will repel as many people as it attracts, intentionally so.) In any case, this is undoubtedly the first paragraph ever written that mentioned both films, so I've accomplished that, at least.

Blogging will continue here, of course. There's no doubt about that; I'm hooked. And tomorrow, I'll be going back to my cult, so I'll have a picture of something gargantuan to represent the weight I've gained in these past few months away from it. But I wanted to explain my intermittent absences, and essentially where my head is at in these strange, fallow days.

Rob