Here we go again

Every few years I start a blog. And then I lose interest after a few entries. Or in the case of my last blog, one entry. I blame this on LiveJournal. Back when LiveJournal was cool, and all my friends read it, it was easy to keep a "weblog." But LiveJournal isn't cool anymore, and so I'm pretty much bereft. But I'm really going to try this time, for the following reasons:

1. I generally like writing in a journalistic format.
2. Several of my friends recently began blogs and I want to jump on the bandwagon (especially as I foresee a quid pro quo, or tit-for-tat, arrangement where they have to read mine since I read theirs).
3. I've decided, at least to start out, to write my entries in list format. This is not only a pretty straightforward format, but it's also something I do all the time anyway, so I might as well kill two eagles with one boulder, as my good friend Jenny might say. And look! I'm already doing it! (I honestly didn't notice until just now.)

I guess that could count as my list/entry for the day, but here is what I was already planning to write a list of:

Things I Do Instead of My Class Readings
Subtitle: Which I Should STOP Doing If I Intend to Succeed in Graduate School

1. Play Peggle. This is new, and it is Graham's fault. It's this game from the Interwebz, kind of like pinball, where you have to shoot a ball into different colored pegs, destroying all the orange ones. It has a unicorns and rainbows motif, and is generally addictive. This also represents a larger category of addictive games, including but not limited to: BrickBreaker on my Blackberry, Mahki on the DS, etc.

2. Read Harry Potter. Even though I have read all seven books collectively approximately 57 times, I will just pick one up, flip to a page at random, and begin reading. Then I finish it and naturally have to read the next one...

3. Bake bread. This is my new hobby, and it's a delicious one. It is a deceptive form of procrastination, because technically the actual work shouldn't take that long, and there's long periods while the bread is rising or baking that could be used to do reading. But instead, I dash back and forth to the kitchen to check that it is rising properly, or just ogle it in general, and don't really get much else done. Then when the bread is finished, one obviously must devote a hearty amount of time to buttering it and eating as many slices as possible.

4. Clean. This is one of my favorite ways to procrastinate. I like to convince myself that I will work better if my environment (it's more of a habitat, really) is tidy. The good thing about this is that it does result in cleaner dishes and a neater apartment, the bad thing is I don't do my work.

5. StumbleUpon. The bane of my existence, for those of you who have not heard of it, is a website you sign up for, which then offers you a "stumble" button toolbar. When you press "stumble," it finds you a site that it thinks, based on the preferences you've entered, you'll like. IT IS SO HARD TO STOP ONCE YOU'VE STARTED. I've found some pretty awesome things (including my bread recipe), but I don't know if that makes staying up literally all night to finish one of my seminar papers last semester worth it.

6. Shop online. Amazon has unlimited recommendations just for me. DeepDiscount has DVD sales constantly. Target.com has been having clearance sales lately--I got a Converse dress for $8.53 (it looks awesome on me, by the way). This is bad for my schoolwork AND my bank account.

7. GoogleReader. Even for all the wonderful things Google has done, I still have to curse Google inventors for coming up with the Reader feature, which allows you to add all the blogs to which you subscribe to a master list so they're all in one place. I currently subscribe to no fewer than 23 blogs, all of which have varying frequencies of posts. Suffice it to say, there's something new to read approximately every 3 minutes.

Of course, by creating this blog, I'm just developing yet another way to procrastinate. But, weak-willed as I am, it's not stopping me from hitting "publish post."