blog-fessions

Every Sunday, I read Parade. Before I even eat breakfast, I read Parade. Sometimes it's great and sometimes it's not. And it wasn't here this morning because we canceled the newspaper, but then we got it again (long story). So today's Parade was all about 2011 as a whole; everything that happened in 2011, from the Super Bowl (I can't even believe it was 2011, it happened so long ago) to the Osama bin Laden situation, to new musical phenomena like Adele.
And it sort of reminded me of my blog. I started it almost a year ago, and I'm coming to a close. As sad as it is, I'm glad that I have accomplished this.
I just want to tell you a little bit of the behind the scenes at this little blog. A lot of people ask me questions about my blog, and I wanted to answer some of those questions.
I have to admit, this blog is pretty time consuming and hard to maintain. And a lot of people say, "wow you must have TONS of free time! I could never have enough time to do that." Well I don't exactly sit around and do nothing all the time. I find the time to blog. I make time by knowing that I need to set it aside every day.
Also, I don't ever know what I'm going to write about until I open the page and click "New Post". And 90% of the time I sit there thinking about the day and thinking about something to write. The other 10% of the time I know what I'll write and during the day I'll think "Hey! That's blogworthy!"
Also, even though this is called "the quest for happiness", it's not really a guide to happiness blog. It's basically a blog about life - how I experience it, what I think about it, how the great things in life lift me up and how the bad things change me and how I think about things.
About 95% of the time, I listen to music when I blog. It helps set the tone of my writing, as if the beat is controlling my writing.
Another thing: I'm not always happy when I write. I know that I have blogged through my tears on multiple occasions. Don't think I'm a big emotional mess, because usually I'm not.
This is also one of those things where my initial intentions are different from the outcomes. I intended to write a blog about how I find happiness everyday in little things. But I've found that happiness doesn't come everyday; if it did we wouldn't recognize it, and we wouldn't appreciate it. We have to learn to cherish the beautiful things we often take for granted.