To Blog or Not to Blog

So here I am. Finished school. Embarking on a career. This blog is no longer mandatory to maintain, as it has been marked and filed away in the history of Centennial College marks that I will most likely never look back upon again. And yet I find that a huge piece of me still wishes it was. I needed an excuse to write just to do it: I think that the largest battle I have waged when it comes to my love of writing is the fact that a large part of my external persona does not mesh well with the concept of being a writer. I’ve played sports from the day I could walk. I wear baseball caps and sweatpants whenever possible, and the term ‘jock,’ is a label that has been placed on me more and more after I left high school (oddly enough, when I began to play a few less sports). I spend a ton of time telling stupid jokes with friends over a beer or a game of X-box, and being friends with a bunch of guys’ guys means I’m not likely to bring up a screenplay I wrote as a side job or a book I was working on when I broke my ankle. Most of the time, I feel like the Adam I am with buddies, girls and hockey teams comes across as nothing like the Adam who takes a seat and writes.

Yet I can’t ignore my desire to do these things, to sit down for a few minutes and clear my head, put some thoughts on paper or pound away at a keyboard until I feel satisfied with something I’ve produced from nowhere. As awkward as it may seem sometimes to read these things back to myself, I like doing them. And I’ve never been one to stop doing something I liked for fear of what others might think about me, even if it was tough at the beginning.

Yet this is where I find myself when deciding whether or not to keep this blog going. I’ve never been a fan of people who tell the world what they think just to do it: I always promised myself that if I was going to use my writing in some type of productive form, I was going to be paid to do it. In my head, that was the way I equated this weird passion I had with maintaining my sense of manliness: ridiculous, but the way I felt nonetheless. On one of the last day of classes, an instructor told us that maintaining our blogs was important: it would keep our writing skills fresh, and serve as a sort of online portfolio that could be immediately referenced by those in the professional world you were trying to impress. That was good enough for me.

So I’ve decided to keep this thing going, if just for the next little while. The job that I am currently doing has me serving as the editor of various technical publications, and so does not give me many opportunities to write creatively or passionately. I’d like to keep the rust off, and to be perfectly honest, I just enjoy doing it. I’ve had some decent feedback from some teachers and friends, and in checking the amount of hits I have after each new blog post, I know that there are definitely some people reading what I have to say. I thank you for that, as the biggest compliment for a writer of any kind is that people are actually taking the time to listen to them.

Where exactly Only the Good Blog Young is headed, I don’t truly know. I would like to keep adding some PR posts (as this was the blog’s original intention), but like fellow blogger Adam Amato in the U.S (Seriously, we found each other through Facebook), I definitely wouldn’t mind writing more on sports and the fairer sex. If anyone out there has any suggestions on future posts, I’m ready to get my Piano Man on and take requests. Until then, thanks to those of you who enjoy spending a few minutes of their day on my words, and I hope to keep you coming back in the future.

‘til next time, keep fit and have fun.

I’m sorry, I obviously stole that from BodyBreak. Always wanted to say it.

Adam