Portrait of the Artist Trying to Portray
DSCF2883, originally uploaded by fieldjesse.
I think Facebook is really sapping some of my energy to post to LiveJournal. Facebook status updates take less time to write than LJ entries, and reading friends' Facebook status updates keeps me updated on my Facebook friends really conveniently. But Facebook is not the best place to lay out any kind of completed thought. If you come up with something that takes a paragraph or more to say, you can post a "note," but I suspect from my own habits that most friends tend to skip over these notes.
So I'm going to make conscious return to LiveJournal, which seems a good place to post personal thoughts a paragraph or two long. Right now, I feel strongly that there is something healthy -- life-sustaining, even -- about sitting down for a short space of time to put a few thoughts together. And not thoughts about my work, but "personal thoughts." I honestly do not know exactly how to define this term, but I suggest to myself, first, that "personal" should mean that I take as the object of the writing my personality. This could be my feelings, I suppose, or my experiences, though I'll have to figure out how to make these count as "thoughts."
By "thought" I mean something more than a Facebook status update, which at best can sum up a thought in the form of an aphorism or a bit of poetry. I think a "thought" properly speaking really should be something thought through. For example, I can tell I'm thinking these last two paragraphs through because it has already taken me more than ten minutes to write, and I have deleted or cut away many of the sentences I tried to write at first. Also I've gone back to make edits and additions. I guess it's this part -- writing, cutting away, re-writing -- that are of the most value here.