I have mixed feelings about blogging, to be honest.  I’ve been doing it since before blogging was a thing – a while ago, I found a blog that I’d written nearly 20 years ago out of pure HTML – wordpress didn’t exist back then, and all I had available was a web server.  I’m glad that blog’s gone – but the point is I’ve been doing it a long time.

And I don’t feel like I’m very good at it.

Blogs have come and blogs have gone in my life, and each time, I’m never happy with the quality of writing, with the topics I come up with, and I feel as if any audience that I have is pissed off as often as they’re interested.  I’ve tried to keep this blog as high quality and on topic as possible, but I don’t really feel like I’ve succeeded.  And if you toss in the fact of my depressive personality and a rather aimless and scattershot learning technique, what you get is a blog that’s rather aimless in its topics and tries to be at the same time too many things and not enough.

I’m not quitting blogging here, but I’m seriously thinking about what I’m trying to accomplish.  Why do I blog in the first place?  And why do I blog about this topic in particular, when my interests are spread far wider?  Why not blog about sports cards?  Why not blog about theology?  Why not blog about piano, or classical music?  Why this, why now?  And am I blogging about J-Pop?  Japanese culture?  Japanese language?  All of the above?  Apparently, I have no idea.

So I’m not quitting this blog, but I’m going to reboot it.  I start a Japanese class at community college at the end of the month.  This marks a transition, a graduation, if you will, from a scattershot, exploration based approach to learning to an actual, methodical approach to learning.  It also marks a transition from me doing it because it interests me to me actually taking it seriously.  Who knows where it will take me now?  Or, conversely, who knows where it will not?

As I take the studies seriously, so will I take this blog. I will think carefully about what I want to accomplish, and that is where I will go.

The petals have fallen from the sakura trees, and where do we go from here?

Ikimasu.  Ganbarou.