After a long hiatus, I am blogging again. My last blog post was in August. I think back upon where I was and what I was doing when I blogged: sitting on an airplane, I had nothing better to do with my time than ruminate over events that had occurred in the preceding few weeks. It was good to get my thoughts out into words, as I reread now, a reminder of where I've been and what I've seen. Almost nine months have passed since I last blogged. Have I not had time to think through events and write?

The sad truth is that I have had the time but haven't bothered to use my time for such excogitation. Instead of fleshing out my thoughts into sentences, paragraphs, and ideas, they rotted away. And as I sit down to write now, I find it difficult to coax the cogs in my brain to turn and produce coherent thoughts. I've noticed that the time period coincident with my blogging break has also seen my vocabulary shrink. Words no longer come readily to me and I struggle--and often fail--to expel the words that perch on the tip of my mind's tongue. I'm aware that temporal association is far from evidence of causation, but I can't help but feel the two are indeed related.

But it's not only words that forsake me--it's ideas too. Language is the material from which thoughts are crafted. As the words are more hesitant to come, so are the ideas. I remember watching a documentary on tv once about a boy who was raised by dogs. Upon his discovery by the civilized world, he was concluded to be mentally retarded: his lack of language skills had limited his brain development and intelligence. Of course, the state of his mental capacity in some counterfactual reality where he had been raised by humans can never be adequately explored to determine that he would have been fine otherwise. But such a conclusion--where the ability to put into words begets ideas--meshes well with what I've seen in myself, although equally unfalsifiable.

So why haven't I written more? I've still written, but it has been in bite-sized morsels: twitter updates, Facebook status posts. I've come to realize that such updates are possibly the junk food of self-expression. They serve as a poor substitute for the more nutritive options, the ones that takes more effort and thus delay gratification. It's so much easier to put up a one-liner than to think through what I really want to say and how I really feel; to dig a little deeper and let me examine how things affect me on a much less superficial, day-to-day level; to process thoughts through to conclusions about who I am and where I'm headed.

I ought to stem the decline in mental resources before the answer to any non-trivial question devolves into a sheepish "I don't know." There's no guarantee that I will blog more even though I see the benefit of doing so. As with my inaugural post almost 8 years ago, this post was a procrastination tactic. I will almost certainly have tasks to do in the future and thus occasion to procrastinate. I just hope that, in avoiding my real work, I might waste my time in a way that's still fruitful--and perhaps throw in a post or two even when I have no reason to procrastinate.