The End

"In my end is my beginning. In my beginning is my end." - T.S. Eliot

I have concluded that baking is a waste of time, but a nice thing to be be able to do.  It is also fattening.  Therefore, without even taking much of a stab at it to begin with, I failed in my pie-a-week quest.  I will work from time to time to master my mom's pie recipe, and I expect to be able to bake a decent cake when I have dinner guests.  But right now I'm just not going to carve out so much time for it.  Not when there are better things to do.

I have also concluded that a personal blog with limited reason for existence, that has an audience of 5 people tops, is another waste of time.  And this blog in particular feels more like a relic than where I really want to do some interesting writing.  I was energized to journal in a public way when I lived abroad briefly, with nothing to do but contemplate beauty and my little place in the world.  No wonder I haven't been able to keep writing along those lines: I have less space to contemplate beauty than to chronicle the minutiae of daily life, and who wants to write about that?

I prefer my offline observations, written away from judgment and harboring the potential to create something new, something more interesting than my day to day.  And other non-fiction projects beckon, including one project that speaks much more closely to my own experience, will be much more useful and interesting to write.

But still this open-ended blog is hard to close!  Do I delete it all, keeping the posts I like offline?  Do I just let it float out here forever?  As long as I've neglected this blog I've felt period guilt twinges, as if I've forgotten to write to a beloved cousin or lost touch with a friend.  But to be honest, I'd rather go hang out with my cousin and stay better in touch with my friends than talk to myself here.

So unequivocally, I come to a conclusion.  I'll leave these old pixels of mine to become my internet immortality, and move on to more productive projects.  It's hardly a goodbye.  Anyone who manages to find me here has at least a dozen other ways to track me down.  See you around.