Another pointless list post -- now with gifs!

(reposted from Jen Unexpected)

It’s 9:50 pm on a Wednesday night. I’m sitting in a Denny’s with a Coke and a plate that held apple pie 10 minutes ago listening to the elderly couple behind me bicker good-naturedly about whether or not their pancake puppies contain white chocolate chips. I left my house so that I could write this article about the current state of same-sex marriage in this country without distractions. Hah.

Instead I am scrolling through my tumblr dash looking for paralympics gifs and posts, flipping over to Ctwitter every four minutes, and coming up with stuff I want to do instead of what I am doing about every seconds. 

What I NEED to be doing:

Things I want to do instead of write this article, in no particular order, for my own reference next time I am sitting around wasting time on the internet and should be doing something freaking productive already:

• Make a post compiling the best tweets of the past week or two from my twitter stream, because my twitter friends are hella funny. 
• Similarly compile and post the hysterical things my children have said lately, because they are also very very funny. 
• Work on the landing page for my new website. 
• Make some new CABD posts. 
• Work on any of the photobooks for the past several years that I am half-assedly trying to put together before my Picaboo groupon expires (I’ve got like four more months, but still).
• Fume about the RNC, the GOP, and the blatant use of transparent falsehoods in the presidential campaign.
• Watch the Paralympics opening ceremony. 
• Go home and settle in to crochet some more geeky amigurumi to sell at Kerrytown Bookfest on September 9. 
• Sleep. 

This will be me tomorrow at work:

so now what?

So I haven't been writing much lately. At least not much longer than 144 characters; if you follow me on Twitter, you've no doubt found that I am quite prolific over there. I do think that as I became more active on Facebook and Twitter my need to blog about my life shrank to almost nothing; cute stories about the kids which I used to blog now go on Facebook; pithy quotes (again from the kids, for the most part) go on Twitter. Random updates about myself and my life can be found both places. And then divorce process finished killing what had been already dying slowly; there was so much I couldn't talk about no matter how desperately I wanted or needed to.

I tried focused blogging, for a bit, experimenting with a crochet blog, a tango blog, even a "look at this ridiculous shit"-type blog that people keep getting book deals for. I'm no Cake Wrecks or Regretsy, however (although I AM in the Regretsy book, so booyah) and no book deals fell out of the sky for me. I also had difficulty keeping on topic, since I'm a bit "ooh shiny!" when it comes to my writing style. So I established this site without really knowing what I'd do with it, since I can't just, you know, NOT have a web presence or a place to write things down when the mood does strike, which is still does once in a while, but I'm still trying to figure out how that presence will manifest itself. I have a few ideas, which I am presenting for your consideration. If anyone is actually reading.

1) Twitter, but more so
I've thought about taking me tweets and expanding on the more interesting/funny/popular ones. The main idea is already there and written, so it's a bit of a time-saver. This seems a little self-indulgent, however.

2) Single-parent blogging.
There are a lot of "mommy" blogs out there. Mine was one of them, for a long time. I don't know if there are a a lot of single-mom blogs. My guess is most single moms, including myself, are too freaking busy and tired to write about how freaking busy and tired we are. We also face a lot of challenges 2-parent families don't have to deal with, and considering how many single-parent families there are out there, I do think we are rather underrepresented in the blogosphere.

3) Dating, with children
An offshoot of the single-parent thing is trying to restore some sort of social life to one's schedule after a divorce. We're still human beings with the need for adult interaction, adult beverages, and adult activities, and this can be quite difficult to manage, as I am discovering. It can also be fun. And heartbreaking and frustrating and all the things regular dating (pre-children) was, but more so.

4) Crochet, with patterns
I'm not sure about this. I love to make stuff. I love that people are starting to actually buy stuff I make. I don't know about pattern-writing, which is harder than it seems, I've discovered; I don't know if anyone would pay me for my patterns.

5) Contract blogging
There are a few aggregate sites which hire bloggers for specific gigs, or for certain topics. I've thought about chucking my own site altogether and trying for a gig like that. However, I don't know how to write a pitch and I have no idea how to go about getting it together for something like that. It would be nice to get even nominal pay for this stuff, though, I mean really.

And again, I just don't know if I can stick with a focused format, or if I'll eventually do what I always do and either wander off, or go back to writing about whatever pops into my head.