For the last hour, I’ve been trying to sleep. It’s not been a red letter day at the Geeky household. Geeky Boy had a disappointing birthday. I let him down and that breaks my heart. But worse, I realized that I had not been thinking about him or what he wanted or needed, only thinking about myself, about convenience. The truth is, I’ve been functioning this way for a long time, and a few bumps in the road have further caused me to turn inward in an attempt, I think, to protect myself. The result, instead, is that I’ve hurt someone I love very much and it’s probably not the first time I’ve done so in the last few months.

I need to reprioritize a little, to think about what’s important and to reinvolve myself in my family’s lives again. Right now, I just don’t think there’s room for blogging, a dissertation, a job, and a family. I won’t be gone forever. I just need to think about why I began blogging in the first place and what I really want to be writing here and how it fits into my life. I think in many ways, blogging has been a substitute for the lack of support and recognition I feel in other aspects of my life. That’s not to say that I think blogging is to blame for the imbalance I feel right now. It’s not. It’s just that what I do here has become something different from what I want it to be.

My next door neighbor moved today. She is 90 and I saw her just a couple of times in the three years I’ve lived here. She stopped by yesterday to say goodbye and a small crowd of people gathered in my driveway to wish her well. I don’t know most of these people. Sure, sometimes I wave to them and some of them are not necessarily people I want to develop close friendships with, but I definitely feel like I should know them.

The connections I made here are real. I enjoyed reading about other people’s lives and sharing in births and deaths, tenure and job searches, struggles with children and parents. It felt like a community here, a virtual neighborhood where we did more than just wave at each other across the street.