I'M BACK!

I'm officially restarting the Daily Okie as of right now. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I think it's the right time now. I know this might sound silly, but I really was doing some soul-searching on this whole thing when I quit blogging before. I had been doing the Facebook thing, and I was posting somewhat regularly here on the Daily Okie. But what discouraged me was that I had very little response. If blogging and Facebook and Twitter and Myspace are "social media"...well, to be honest, I had very little social interaction from it.

Let me give you an example of the situation I faced. Heidi is on Facebook, and still posts regularly there. She will post a status and within an hour or so she'll have several comments and replies from her many friends. It's usually 4-5 replies, minimum. And this happens for her with just about every status she posts. EVERY STATUS SHE POSTS. Lots of you who are on Facebook know exactly what I'm talking about. Well, for me...I'd post a status, and through the course of the entire day, I might get 1-2 replies. For some of my political posts, I could understand folks not wanting to respond...but even my non-political fun stuff that was designed to have SOMEONE SAY SOMETHING, FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE, got NADA, ZIP, ZILCH, GORNISCHT, ZERO, NOTHING. And I have never really gotten much in the way of comments on my blog, either. This wasn't as disturbing, but I myself am a social kind of person on the blogs I actually bother to read. I don't read a TON of blogs, but I do comment fairly regularly on those I frequent. I knew I had regular readers to my blog, but I was still not getting much interaction. Web 2.0, in spite of its supposed "friend-ly" nature (if you're pardon the pun), just wasn't friendly to me. I got to wondering if people just weren't that interested. You like to think that people who would call themselves your friend are somewhat interested in what you have to say. I just wasn't feeling that at all. (As a humorous side note, only one person noticed I had shut down my Facebook account, because I had disappeared from his friend list...thanks, Chong!!)

Around the same time, I was getting very busy, with trying to help Heidi deal with the kids, working my regular job, and starting up football officiating so I could make up some of the income we've lost over the past year. So between not getting social interaction in the virtual world and getting busier in the real world, I quit. I quit it all...no more Facebook (I'm not planning to go back to that one any time soon), and no more blogging.

It was very liberating. I didn't feel any pressure to come up with things to blog about. I didn't feel the urge to check my Facebook page. I didn't have to think about being online. I still checked e-mail regularly, and still do, but I didn't waste time sitting on my butt when I could be out doing something real, like playing with the kids or working on the car or making non-virtual money for my family so we could do MORE real things. It was a relief to not worry about how much time I'd spend writing on this thing, even when I had a good idea. Blog posts take a good deal of time to create, because I try to be a good writer and I hate putting up a post that doesn't have good writing. I revise and recheck things usually several times before posting, to make sure a post flows well and is coherent in its ideas. Sometimes I rush, and I end up very unhappy with it. Sometimes I spend a couple of hours on a post and it still doesn't hold up well and I feel like I screwed up the idea or wasted my time. All that was gone, and it was really good.

But after a while, I did miss one thing. The Internet has been wonderful at connecting people with similar interests, as I've discovered in owning Land Rovers, Mustangs, Ramchargers, and Broncos. This is a really good thing, because in the pre-Internet days, you had to somehow find a local club through postings or word-of-mouth or whatever...going where like-minded people were likely to go. Or you'd try to find a magazine that covered what you liked, because there were usually articles or ads or classifieds or the like that would lead you where you needed to go. Today, you sit down open Google/Bing/Ask/Yahoo, type in "Ford Mustang Forums" or "knit one purl two" and get hundreds of results that lead to very valuable resources. I have stay somewhat active on the message boards of the stuff I like, but I wanted to be able to share my own experiences in a way that anyone could find. If you read my archives (or were one of my 3-4 regular readers), you remember how I would talk about my challenges with my kids, or my excitement over my cars, or my thoughts on sports or the Sooners, or whatever. I missed talking about that stuff, sharing my experiences. The forums are OK for asking questions or helping out others, but they're not necessarily as good for talking about that sort of thing, because you can't get too long-winded in forums (so that kind of leaves me out). :-) Heidi is great at listening to me, and she really makes a concerted effort, but she doesn't always understand or appreciate what I'm talking about. And sometimes, God bless her heart, she only cares because I'm the one talking about it. In short, I had things I wanted to talk about, to people who could understand, appreciate, and care about the topic and the information I provided.

So I figured, "hey, the blog is still there. Why don't I just start blogging again?"

However, (as Mom always used to speak it, "HOWEVER COMMA") I am leaving a few things behind for good. I thought a lot about the stuff I want to talk about...because the blog is really mostly about me. Now, I AM a fairly opinionated person at times. I have ideas and thoughts and I want to express them. But what I don't want is to do what so many others do, and do better...be a political pundit. I might have original ideas, and I might enjoy talking politics...but there's already too much of that on the Internet. I am going to work on keeping my opinions to non-political subjects, but most importantly, about STUFF I LIKE. These things include (but are not limited to):

Cars (especially cars I own/have owned, or cars I like)
Mechanical work on cars
Sports and sports officiating
Computers, and especially network and security work
Guns and gun-related things
Blogs and stuff I read
Science and technology
Music
Family and kids
Comedy
Pop culture (my own...ahem..."unique" view of it, of course)
Things I'm doing (like the marathon live-blogging, back in April)
My personal non-political philosophy, though this will mostly be stuff of a practical, applied, non-abstract nature.

and all sorts of other stuff. I want my opinions to be about things that can be fun, goofy, or meaningless. I want my opinions to be meaningful, when they NEED to be meaningful. I want my opinions to be interesting, when someone in need looks for them. My opinions on politics are boring and trite and tiresome. But my opinions on and experiences with cars and sports can be fun, and can also be informative or useful. My opinions and perspectives on my kids are fun (at least for me) and can also be meaningful. I don't just want to be one of those jerks on the Internet who says things and thinks everyone cares about every word.

So I'm going to write again, regularly. I hope every few days at the latest, and I will be talking about all sorts of topics again. And you don't have to comment on my posts, or even read my posts if you don't want to, and I'm OK with that. Maybe someone somewhere will find what I'm saying and it will be of useful interest to them, or meaningful to them, or humorous to them...that's all I am asking now.

So like I said, I'm back, and you're welcome to come along again.