Posted 10:06 PM by Blah blah

Oh my God! Jody finally updated! Ya baby... Another classic as usual.

I hadn't checked Jeff's journal for a while and discovered he stopped writing over a month ago. What a bummer... Jeff is one of my all-time favorite bloggers. Eloquent, passionate, sexually explicit, intellectually challenging, and always interesting. He gave a fantastic perspective on the life of a gay lawyer in New York City. Even his last entry explains how you can get tired of blogging and does it much better than I did:

You start to live like there's this Greek chorus around you. Slave to the blog, slave to the readers. They're going to be pissed because I haven't updated in a while. They're going to make fun of me for thinking this, get pissed at me for doing that, get on my case about that other thing. But I have to tell them, I have to update, because if I don't, they'll leave, and I need them.

I needed it. I wanted to prove that I exist. But I know I exist. And I don't need this anymore -- or want this anymore. I'm just a person living my life, and I want it to be mine again. I want to stop swimming around in a fishbowl.

I've felt so liberated since last week. I've remembered that I don't have to tell anyone else what I'm doing. I don't have to worry about whether I should write about such-and-such. It feels so refreshingly normal.

A blog gives you instant gratification. It's like anonymous sex -- it's quick and it's cheap and it depletes you and it's never quite satisfying enough but you keep doing it anyway, trying to get there, you don't know where but there, and meanwhile you could be making things that are deeper, more intricate, but instead you keep draining the well every day, and you never have anything left over.

I want to put my creative energies into something that doesn't give me instant gratification. I want to work on something more long-term, something deeper.

Amen, Jeff. Same here. I will miss you.

I was checking up on Christine and noticed that she just formally launched her company's site, Oriented, a few days ago. Wow---many congratulations, Christine! She is definitely the Queen of Marketing, in my book. Note how she tackled promoting her business by asking her connections to organize a series of Happy Hour parties in Shanghai, Taipei, Beijing, San Francisco, and Seattle. I'd met one of her friends helping with the venture, Jim Leu, last December in Mountain View. He's now in Shanghai stirring up trouble.