Regruntled

I was disgruntled for a while, a little bit ago, but I'm gruntled again.

What ticked me off was two things, both relative to blogs -- the number of people who read this one versus others, and the difficulty I find sometimes in putting words to paper. (Words to silicon doesn't have quite the same ring, does it?)

The first was exacerbated by reading an article this morning which was written by Naomi Dunford, who's a bright person with a blog on small business marketing. I like hearing what she has to say, even though most of it doesn't apply to me, because she has an irreverent insight that can be pretty funny, too. Seeing her article, I thought 'gee, its been a while since I dropped her a note to see how she is doing' -- so I did, and to my surprise, she didn't respond. Now, we're not tight friends, by any means -- but still, it made me wonder. What, am I chopped liver? Which I know is overreaction. And then there's a woman who writes a blog oriented toward Muslims, called Muslim Apple, which I like to read to get insights into what it means to be a Muslim in America. I don't always agree with, or sometimes even understand, what she says, but its a good blog, and (though I blush to admit this) I think of reading it as good for me. I don't get much insight into that mindset, and I wanted one. We've exchanged the occasional email, and she seems pretty nice. Well, as it happens, the other day she wrote something that agitated me quite a bit, and I wrote a very long reply to the effect of you have got to be kidding me -- tell me that you didn't really mean this, because this is what it sounded like to me. Which, I think, ticked her off, because now she doesn't respond to emails, either. Wow. Doing good there, Bill. Two for two. Who else can I piss off, today?

More direct to the source of my mood, there have been things lately that I wanted to write about, because I found them interesting -- such as the articles about whether speculation is truly a major component of current oil prices (as best as I can determine, the answer is Yes but Not A Lot Unless The Flow Is Limited, and Sometimes Other Times ), or the articles about why Tim Russert died (as far as I see, its because he had some risk factors, not others, and the ones he had turned out to be much worse than his doctors thought), specifically as it related to how the heart works, how cardiology works, and why the two don't always mesh, or the state of the economy (pretty uniform there -- it stinks, and its still trending down unless you're a CEO), or whether those girls in Gloucester actually had a pact to get pregnant (I've seen quotes both ways, sometimes from the same people), or whether the cops are overreacting to events a lot more than society should accept (my hunch? Yes. Big time.) . But when I wanted to actually say something, the words wouldn't flow. Nothing new to say, nothing graceful to add. This was pretty depressing to me. Should I stop this blog? I wondered. (Philosophical question: if I did, would anyone notice?)

So I was disgruntled. I'm not, now, mostly because that bread turned out well. But you know? You can only bake so much bread.