It’s my birthday, and the first of my incoming birthday greetings made a point to reference that 37 is a prime number, and that it should bear some sort of significance, and coming from the source I know they think that’s about as absurd as I do. That’s a nice feeling, somehow. I’m unsure if it was meant as a reference to my work at Amazon, in which case the comment was worth a joke and a half.

2019 was a tremendously long year, bucking the apparent stereotype of time moving faster as we get older. Maybe I just haven’t found the other end of that bell curve yet. This is first post here for 2020, and first in over half a year, though there have been a few attempts in that time that I lost steam on. I’ve been a poor user of social media for that time, outside of a stint at trying to keep up with Inktober, which was fun, but my surroundings at the time did not lend a great amount of free time to do so.

While I was in Japan, Facebook seemed to have a higher purpose. It was the easiest way to tell everyone what was happening. That didn’t really change after I changed continents, but somehow my return to America made it seem to gradually lose purpose, though the need of those things may not have actually faded.

I find myself reeling each time I look at Twitter or Facebook (and Instagram, for that matter). The swirling horror of politics hovers over every brief session, and I don’t mean just the political posts, but the drama surrounding the very social networks themselves. Am I supposed to delete all the accounts as some gesture of fighting the man, as at least one of my friends has done, or do I try force my eyes out of focus to ignore all of that and throw things on there in an effort to keep up with old friends because these places happen to be the places most people wound up doing that sort of thing?

Does posting pictures of my own kids being goofy somehow violate their rights to privacy? Should I be actively reacting to other peoples’ political posts? Should I be spamming my own memes in a desperate attempt to push the needle back towards sanity, no doubt uncovering opinions of friends and distant family that I might not be happy I learn about? This blog was intended as a sort of solution to this, keeping the bulk of the personal in my own little corner of the Internet, but these sorts of thoughts fill my mind every time I think about trying to get involved in social media again and it’s strangely exhausting, which has generally kept me from posting much of anything.

You know what? Even this is exhausting. I’m going to talk about Star Trek, now. It’s my birthday. I’ll do what I want.