the decline of the blog

I've been on Facebook just over two years now, and in that time most of my friends have joined too. In addition, I've "friended" various acquaintances I've met while doing theatre and through mutual friends. It's nice being able to casually keep in touch with people I would probably otherwise not see or communicate with more than a few times a year, if that. In some cases, thanks to commenting on friends' Facebook status messages I've fostered new friendships that would have otherwise fizzled out had I merely met them once at a party and then rarely saw them in person afterward.

Plus, the nice thing about electronic communication is that it waits for you. You get to it when you get to it, based on your own schedule, instead of leaping out of the chair like a Pavlovian dog at the sound of a ring. If I speak to a friend on the phone, I might have to sit with a phone to my ear for half an hour or more. If we use instant messenger, we can work on other things at the same time, perhaps even talking to other people online. With IM and email, we can carry on discussions of no particular consequence that would be ridiculous to waste time with on a phone call. For more important correspondence, with email there's a written, easily searchable record of it. And I can do it at any time of day -- while I'm thinking about it, before I forget -- whereas a phone call can only politely be placed by 9:30 p.m. at the very latest. This doesn't always mesh well with my theatre schedule.

I know many people don't see it this way and prefer to use the phone -- or, in the more likely scenario, not keep in touch with people at all -- and that's fine too. It's not my thing, but to each his own.

In any case, I generally update my Facebook status at least once a day, and friends will often leave comments; sometimes the back-and-forth banter will result in full-fledged conversations right there for mutual friends to see. It effectively becomes a message board. But one consequence of this is that I feel less compelled to blog now. Most of my blog readers will have already read my thoughts in my Facebook status messages. Hell, with my phone, I update my status every time I ride a new roller coaster!

So what has been happening lately is that I blog once a month, twice at best, and there's too much territory to cover in a single post. For example, I just noticed that in July, I neglected to mention the weekend I spent by myself at the cottage. This included stopping at Cedar Point on the way there to kill some time on a pleasant Friday night. With very little effort, I rode ALL 16 coasters in the park! In under five hours! (I didn't count Jr. Gemini since you normally need a child with you to ride it, although sometimes you can get lucky.) And the next day I spent almost four hours making a chalk drawing of the cottage -- not only my longest drawing session since college, but my longest ever without a break. It was great, and a beautiful day to just relax.




Budgeting
In time I may write more about the first year living on my own and what I've learned, but suffice it to say that I've cut back drastically on my spending. It's not that I was particularly high-maintenance to begin with, but I adjusted my budget to make up for the increase in my health insurance and medical costs. I cut out things like Netflix and trimmed back the line item for seeing theatre. By eating healthier, I'm spending less on groceries because I no longer stock the cupboards and freezer with snacks and convenience foods (aside from eating less in general). And after February's gas bill, I turned down the heat and started wearing my fleece and slippers at home.

But it wasn't all about cutting; several things worked in my favor. I effectively got a small raise where I'm working, although it wasn't explicitly called that. In addition, my unused vacation/sick time from when my old company closed is being paid out, which is a nice little sum. To top it off, my rent did not go up when I renewed my apartment lease like they had originally said.

Probably the biggest difference is that my music income has been much higher than I originally estimated in my budget, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the numbers once I wrote down all the gigs I had already done this year and had coming up. Since then I've added a few more, mainly subbing as an organist in churches. I will probably get back into music directing next year too. (This is not to say I'm making more than I did in previous years; rather, I had always grossly underestimated it, since I theoretically cannot predict how many gigs I will have in a given year. But in reality, I always make more than that estimate.)

So, I'm still keeping the cutbacks I made and I'm being more careful about discretionary spending, but with my redone budget, I'm able to keep living in the same apartment another year and even -- what a concept! -- put money in my Roth IRA. I really like my apartment (it's the perfect size for me, on the first floor, and my neighbors are whisper quiet) so I'm glad I didn't have to move, in spite of the crappy health coverage situation.

However... I left my vacation/travel budget the same. It's very important to me to have that outlet for amusement parks in particular. And speaking of which, Stu scored some discount tickets at work for Darien Lake, so we'll be making a day trip over there next Saturday. And so, The Year of the Awesome continues.