discernment

How do you tell the difference between "giving it all you've got" and trying too hard?

The stress of the upcoming trip to Houston is weighing me down these days, especially since I checked my schedule a few days ago and saw they'd changed my scheduled ultrasound from the head & neck department to neurology, and added a biopsy. Maybe the original schedule was incorrect. Maybe they always schedule "with biopsy" just in case they need to do one. Of course, they'll only do a biopsy if they think they need to: if they see something like, say, cancer.

To say "this is freaking me out" isn't quite accurate, but it's close. I'm not actively freaking out but there is some walled-off corner of my brain where much freakage is occurring.

Anyway: I'm thinking about what I want to do with this blog, which has some very good stuff on it but a whole lot of not-good stuff, too. I'm thinking about how much time I want to invest in blogging. I'm thinking all sorts of future-activity thoughts these days, regarding vacations and jobs and medical treatments. I can't make any decisions involving other people until I know what's going on, and that's frustrating. I can make decisions that affect only me... but that's hard.

Several weeks of steady writing and carnival submissions (recipes and Grand Rounds) pushed me four levels up in the TTLB Ecosystem. Three weeks off and I've slid right back down to Crustacean. That's OK, I'm very fond of crustaceans. What that experience clarified to me is that the omnibus nature of this blog is not conducive to garnering permanent links. Individual posts are linked often, but those eventually fall off the front page and evaporate. If I want to climb up in the ecosystem, I need to appear on more blogrolls, and the content here is too scattershot for that too happen.

Now I am thinking about whether or not I care about the ecosystem and traffic and all that. I can't say I don't care, but what I'm trying to figure out is why is it that I care? If I'm going to get serious about writing, blogs can be very powerful marketing tools. Right now this blog has about six different purposes and they get in each other's way. But I don't know if I want to maintain separate topical blogs!

At the moment I lack the discipline to do much of anything, but stay tuned for the pending upheaval.