To blog or not to blog...

When I was abroad in my junior year I had a pseudo photo blog. I call it a pseudo blog because while the format was similar to a blog in that each page had a photo (unless of course you chose to view them as a slideshow or as small icons on a page) , the photos could be commented on asynchronously and like a photoblog, and that I often wrote little stories or comments below the pictures it wasn't a daily sort of thing with one picture a day, every once in a while I would upload 300 some odd pictures.

It was a useful way for me to keep in contact with family and to explain through pictures to my relatives that would never consider leaving the US why their crazy Californian niece was hitting 3 continents in a year. [example story, my cousin in Arkansas recently got facebook and wrote on my wall Hey N! I MISS YOU! You applied for a Job in Japan...YIKES! I don't like foriengn (sic) countries...g2g ♥ya! ---- wisdom from a high school girl in the middle of nowhere, on whom I think you could safely bet your life savings that she will never leave the US. Love my relatives to pieces, but I sometimes wonder how we managed to come from the same gene pool. I can't wait till my NRA uncle shows up to my liberal feminist college graduation and sits in on my Japanese department reception dinner. ]

So I got the job, and am going back to Japan on the infamous JET program to teach English in a yet to be determined place, and I'm trying to decide whether to blog or not.

Reasons to blog:

1. My dad needs reassurance that I'm alive, or else he'll start complaining in a semi-joking way that I'm making him do 'women's work' by not keeping in touch and making him worry. ( if nothing else... I have an interesting family. I may end up just telling stories about them in my last attempts to make up for posts)
2. I told my friend today right after saying that I might not come back to the US for two years that I was considering not blogging and she had a mini panic attack.
3. I suck at keeping a journal, and yet want to remember all this stuff.
4. I wrote my thesis (God how I love using the past tense on that one) about people blogging about Japan, it only seems appropriate
5. My cousins in Arkansas that 'don't like 'foriengn countries'.... need I say more?

Reasons not to blog:

1. I've heard through the grapevine that the JET program looks at the forums and blogs that talk about how much they hate the program and provide information on how to grow weed abroad. In the second example, that person got kicked out - obviously. I'm not all that excited about having a private blog after doing this project and seeing what public blogs can achieve, and yet I don't want to be blogging if I can't speak to my friends and relatives about things that I might not want to be read by my boss.
2. I wrote a thesis (past tense again!! woot woot) about blogging about Japan, even if it's only me that knows that it's me... there's still a lot to live up to.
   
3. etc. etc.....

So. To blog or not to blog? This is literally the question.

-N