Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Special Entry: Some Random Thoughts



Random Thoughts 

In recent years I have noticed a number of trends concerning this website. I’m going to mention two of those here, as I noticed them again as I began writing my college basketball tournament prediction entries. 

The first trend is one that I’ve mentioned many times, and that is that it’s become more and more difficult for me to write lengthy commentaries. I always go back and see what I did the year before and I’m often amazed at how much detail I included. That was certainly the case when I looked at my tournament prediction entries from last year. 

The other trend is one that I haven’t mentioned as often, and that is that when I look at the previous year’s entry I often realize that I made a change which I have completely forgotten about. That was the case this year with the NCAA Tournament Play-In Games entry. 

I was sitting there thinking how annoying it was that I had to make all of my picks for the NCAA Tournament Monday night, including the 4 play-in games, even though the tournament really doesn’t start until Thursday. I was thinking to myself, “You know, I may have to just bite the bullet and separate out the first four games this year.” I was pleasantly surprised when I went back and looked and realized that I’d already taken that step last year. 

But having completely forgotten about such a key change made me a bit sad and I did long for the days when writing this blog felt both fun and meaningful. I don’t mean to hurt the feelings of my imaginary readers. This blog is still fun and it does mean something to me or else I wouldn’t still do it. But far too often I feel as though writing is a chore. It could all be in my head, but I don’t feel as if I’m getting better as a writer. On the contrary, I feel as if writing is become more and more difficult. 

In reality, I know that there is almost no chance of this blog ever helping me get a job covering sports. Thus, if I’m not improving, and I’m not really having much fun, it really does feel like a waste of time to continue this blog. In fact, it may be more accurate to say that it’s worse than a waste of time, because I also lose sleep and use up certain resources to maintain the blog. And yet for some reason I really can’t even consider not doing this blog. 

Before I had this blog I used to write hundreds of pages a week just for the hell of it. That would never happen now. I probably wouldn’t write at all if I didn’t have this website. I guess in my mind I have just not wanted to let this thing go. I’ve been determined to keep writing, even if only for myself and the imaginary readers. I don’t know. I just don’t want to give up on this. 

So this is kind of a weird intro to the best time of the year. But I couldn’t help it. It just sort of came out.  


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