~~~
Day’s Verse:
“This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” he said to them.
“I tell you the truth, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God.”
Mark 14:24 – 25
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Today marks my blog’s second birthday! Two years ago today Ian and I started our joint blog. Since then we’ve learned lots of HTML and I have written 704 blogs. In celebration I changed the background picture to a picture of the Meteor Cake I described earlier. I kind of like it. Should I keep this background for a while?

The most pertinent question that applies on my 730^th day of blogging is: What has motivated me to keep posting so regularly? Other questions crowd in: Why did I start? Why blog at all? Why write what I write? What, if anything, has changed in my life because of blogging? Who do I think of as my audience when I blog? Why do I take the tone that I do? Does Semicircular Reasoning reflect who I am in person?

My motivations, I think, have evolved since I started. When Ian and I began our joint blog at marriage.analogcafe.net two years ago, barely a month after our wedding, I imagined it as a place for our families to come to keep up with our new life as a married couple. It would let us keep in touch with far-off relatives and friends. I envisioned Ian and myself posting blogs on the same events, but from our two different perspectives – kind of a he says/she says type situation. That did happen occasionally, but usually only with extreme prodding from me. It turns out Ian doesn’t like to write for fun very often; he’d rather do math that doesn’t involve numbers, or swing from virtual lightposts with spiderwebs, or read the same novels (only from lack of variety in our library) over and over again. My family didn’t really show much interest in reading our new blog, but Ian’s did, and I learned what fun it is to receive comments.

At first I wrote long indiscriminate blogs about what I felt, what had happened in the day. Over time my tone changed – it continues to change, in fact. I started writing about thoughts and complained less. My mind constantly swirls with ideas, and Semicircular Reasoning has become a place to vent some of the less strange ones. My audience expanded to include not only my family but also other people I met online – people I may never encounter in person, but whose lives I am concerned about and who are interested in my activities, too. For those people, my blog is who I am; how I portray myself in my words, pictures, and site layout form their knowledge of me. Being the honest, trusting, naïve woman I am, I would like to think that I have portrayed myself accurately here. That desire to be me, and to express myself on the web, in part drove the shift to my solo blog.

Why blog, though? So I have an small audience. So I reflect somewhat accurately who I am. I answer the so what? question with four responses:

(1) Everybody wants to belong. We all want attention (some of us more than others!) and to be affirmed in our thoughts, hopes, and dreams. This site provides the opportunity for me to elicit that somewhat.
(2) I also love debate and discussion, and a blog can be a wonderful forum for introducing a controversial issue and hearing other viewpoints.
(3) I love to write. What better place to keep those skills honed than in an environment where I occasionally receive feedback?
(4) Finally, many people have cited blogs as a wonderful opportunity to vent, to think aloud, to complain, to bemoan (howl, at times), to get out frustrations in a safe, anonymous environment. I do use it to emote and to express opinions – I do hate magnetic car ribbons! I hope none of you have them – but not for that primarily.

And, after two years, the honest truth is: I love blogging and I’m addicted to feedback. But even if nobody read my blog, I would still write. Because I can.