Blogging Difficulties

Blogger has been having problems for a couple of days, and yesterday evening I wasn't able to access it or any other blog that uses it at all. Other blogs have been reporting other problems, so I think it's erratic and may be interfacing with different ISPs and connections in different ways. We seem to be here now, though, and Blogger appears to be back to normal, so we'll see if that continues.

But speaking of blogging difficulties, I've also been feeling very restricted with the speed of blogging. Probably political issues move faster than other pop culture topics, so it may just be limitations I'm placing on myself. It's my blog, after all, and I can write about what I want to. But it's only Sunday, and I feel like I completely missed Cindy Sheehan's rough expulsion from the State of the Union on Tuesday for wearing a T-shirt with the number of dead troops from the Iraq war, her arrest, the dropping of the charges, and the apology from Capitol police because they had no grounds to remove or arrest her in the first place (according to Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer, they were enforcing "an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol"). I likewise didn't get to mention that the wife of a Congressman was (much more politely and without the accompanying arrest) asked to leave the SOTU for a T-shirt supporting the President's policies. The first Republican vote for House majority leader that counted more votes cast than voters present to cast them passed by completely unremarked upon by this blog. As I was writing yesterday about Oprah and James Frey, it felt like ancient history (which at least was tempered by the fact that I could link to a contemporary article about A Million Little Pieces's editor).

Maybe I've just got to adjust my expectations for what I want to do in this blog. When I started, I thought I'd write about politics and issues to some extent, but I've allowed myself to be pretty much taken over by them. Partly that's because we seem to live in a time when politics is electric. The stakes seem far higher than they were ten years ago, but that doesn't mean I've got to go all political all the time (or maybe just mostly political most of the time). I guess I've allowed current events to hijack the agenda of my blog, and maybe I need to reassert control a little bit more and lower the pressure I'm putting on myself to keep up with the news as it happens. Over the next few days, I'll reassess what I'm doing and what I want to do, and I'll see how I can get all that balance out to make myself a happier blogger.