Another Set of Changes

You may remember that about nine months ago, I posted about some changes that were coming to this blog. The big one was that I was going to be focusing less of reading and writing, and more on my personal life, thought the Weekend Review posts, which served as weekly life updates. As time has gone on, those updates have been less and less frequent, and so has my posting in general. 

I want to revitalize this blog a bit, and part of that is going to involve rethinking it's purpose. I want this blog to first and foremost be a place for me to share my thoughts and ideas about what I've been thinking, reading, writing, and doing. While the life update posts do fit into that in a way, they distract from the main idea a little.

I am going to have those life update posts drift away from this blog a bit in the near future. Yes, that means I do have a secondary blog that those are going to go onto. For those of you who know Spencer and his blog, my goal is to go a bit in that direction, posting daily, or at least three or four times a week. Some days might be a simple outline of what I was doing, others might be a discussion relating to something I heard about in class, or read online. My goal is for the posts to be short but current and interesting. 

This blog will remain mostly as it is. Book reviews (hopefully more of them) will remain on here, as will my thoughts on writing, homeschooling, college, and other similar topics. Likely, if you follow both blogs, you'll see some topics coming up over there in a rough form, and them over here a week or two later, having been polished and written and edited to satisfaction. 

This blog will probably start to look a little different soon, so get ready for that. I hope to still post here once a week or (maybe) more, and over on the other blog three to six times a week.

My new blog is really intended for those who really want to keep up with my life, and I imagine will mostly keep the attention of my offline friends and family. I won't promote it much, either here or on social media, unless there is something going on over there that I think is really interesting.

Click here to see my new blog: The Daily Ramble. I am planning on starting to post over there very soon, this week or next, so grab the RSS feed now to stay connected! It is pretty boring and barren over there at the moment, but that will change soon.

The Semicolon Project 2015

Yesterday was April 16th. If you spend time on the parts of social media that I do, you may have heard of the Semicolon Project, which happens on 4/16 each year.

This is the image that circulated a few years ago about this.

I love things like these because they create a sense of community and allow us to do one simple thing to show that we are part of a larger movement. 

For me in particular, the date April 16th holds a lot of significance. It was a date where my life changed quite a bit at one point in the past, and to this day, it remains a day of thought and introspection for me. 

I don't talk about this much on this blog, and I'm not going to start now, but anxiety and depression are things that I struggle with on a daily basis. I have people close to me who suffer from these issues as well, and they have effected my life in any number of ways. I don't know who I would be if I did not suffer from them. 

The semicolon on my wrist.

I think things like the Semicolon Project are important because, as small as they are, they remind us that we need to celebrate the small victories. Celebrate the sentence that has not yet ended. 

The semicolon on my wrist will fade in a day or two, but while it's there, it reminds me that depression and anxiety are a neverending battle between two parts of myself, and that the day I give up is the day the sentence ends. That sentence isn't ending anytime soon. 

I'm a grammar nerd, and so I love semicolons no matter what, but the one on my wrist reminds me that I'm alive and I'm still fighting.