Blogging Vacations
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James Joyner | Monday, May 25, 2009 |
Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation and writes,
As for me, it is hard to describe the experience of the long-distance blogger who takes a short rest for a while. A few will know – Mickey, Glenn, and Josh come to mind. Your brain feels like an arm after it’s liberated from resting against a wall for a few minutes. You feel bouncy at first then heavier than ever. And just as you start to feel normal again … it’s back to Typepad we go.
It’s less the constant attempt to think, or to try to think, about everything while it’s still happening all the time, it’s the constant emotional and intellectual exposure to the world. More and more people experience this – Facebook, anyone? – but there’s an intensity to the high-traffic, high-volume, one-person blog (even with the indispensable Chris and Patrick) that takes its toll on the psyche. You lose the space to wander in your own thoughts in silence, without the constant humiliation of time and public error. You lose solitude. If you’re like me, that’s a big loss most of the time.
Having just returned from the longest hiatus since I started this blog in January 2003, I know the feeling. Until that six day break, I probably hadn’t gone more than two and certainly more than three consecutive days without writing during that span. I blogged on my honeymoon and on the day my daughter was born.
I am, however, somewhat amused that even during Sully’s well-deserved break, he wrote more posts (or, at least, there were more posts that weren’t signed by someone else) than most bloggers who weren’t on vacation. Maybe Henley’s got a point.
Photo by Flickr user *Micky under Creative Commons license.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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