May God's love be with you...always...

I guess I should begin with a few disclaimers, to alleviate suspicions and worries.

1. This isn't an April Fool's Joke. Obviously my timing is perfect, but I promise I'm not going to reneg on this tomorrow. Though, as it happens, this came about as I was considering attempting a "quitting blogging" prank.

2. I'm not closing up shop forever. I will be back before you know it. Promise and pinky-swear.

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Okay, so here's the deal.

I realized that April Fool's Day was approaching, and contemplated pulling a huge, overly-dramatic scam that I was quitting the internet, or at least the blogging world. Maybe I was sick of blog drama. Maybe I was getting in trouble at work. Maybe I had decided to switch my full online focus to Twit/book. Some kind of justification for closing up shop on PBB, before revealing in the comments that it was all a joke.

But the more I considered what I would say in my "final post," the sadder I became. The fact is, I'm likely gonna stop blogging eventually. There will come a point in my life when I'll do more living than commenting, and hopefully when I'll have someone I can share most of this stuff with, so that I don't need to dump all of my inanities onto the online populace. Maybe I won't ever get tired of blogging. But somehow I know that this thing we have, it's gonna change in some fundamental way one day. This made me sad.

I began thinking about why this made me so sad. Obviously this is a question I think about pretty regularly. But my new fascination with Twitter has brought some questions to a head. Namely: why do I (ab)use social networking sites? Is it actually about networking socially? Can you really call a 140-character @statement social?

And, once posing the question to myself, I had to admit that I use these technologies--whether consciously or no--for really narcissistic purposes. I tweet, I "like," I comment because I think I'm clever or have insight, and I want everyone to see that and tell me so. I check back to see if people respond to what I have to say. I wait with bated breath for blog comments.

I'm an insufferable egoist, in other words. And these technologies, however fun and interesting, feed that addiction.

I talked to my friend Amanda about this yesterday (via IM, natch), and she suggested a break. A fast from self-motivated, self-promoting social networking sites. No personal blogging, no Facebook, no Twitter. Maybe commenting on other people's sites, but even that, I'm not so sure about. Because it's still about me. The insistence that what I have to say is valuable, important, or clever.

So I'm out of here for a month. Off the blog grid. Won't respond to TwitBook either. If you want to contact me directly, please do so through AIM or email. If you don't know either of mine, ask around. A little bit of detective work should find them though.

[I just realized I'm going to miss the Fifth Annual Embrace the Lame Day on the 28th. Wow. That hurts. My own fake holiday, that I got strangers from around the world to participate in over the last four years. Ugh. Well, maybe it's just as well.]

I don't know what else to say. Maybe this makes sense to you. Maybe not. Doesn't matter. It makes sense to me.

I'll be back on May 1, hopefully with new insight or at least something edifying to say. From that point on, we'll see how things go.

I love you guys. Yeah, I can say that without having met you. Be good.