It is that time of year again – nay, that time of the decade.  The time where we hit an arbitrary marker that causes us to look back on a particular, arbitrary period of time, and think about how it measures up against a series of arbitrary criteria that matter not to anyone.  But we have, indeed, hit upon one of those markers, so this is a good time for reflection.

I consider this blog to be aimless and disorganized.  Usually my posting schedule is “oh, I have something to post about, I think I’ll post about it.”  So I write up a bit of a post and then click publish.  That’s it.  Generally, what you see, I’ve just taken five to ten minutes to write up, and then clicked the little button.  The fact that it’s even of the quality it is, is pretty much a miracle.  It could probably be more if I were willing or able to put aside my personal integrity and turn into a kind of “social chameleon” – being what people want me to be instead of who I am.  That is, indeed, how you get followers.  It is also how you eventually lose sight of who you are and become solely subject to the whims of your audience.

But, the truth is, that what I’m doing now isn’t working.  I’m just blogging about whatever I want, whenever I want to, and at the end of the day, there is no coherent mission to this blog, no cohesive theme or idea other than loosely talking about all things Japanese, and while folks may consider it interesting, it’s only marginally useful.

I generally do not do new year’s resolutions.  I consider them to be additional pressure that I don’t need in my life, to bite off too much and eventually end up scaling it back until it’s worthless.  But perhaps it would be a useful exercise, as the decade comes to an end, to figure out what I want to do with this blog and then do it.

It’s either that or stop posting, and I don’t really want to do that.