My Final Blog Post

About six weeks ago or so my immediate family (my wife and two daughters) had what amounted to an unintentional and unplanned intervention with me. It was just like the TV show, except that there were no cameras rolling, and there was no drug addiction or alcoholism or anything like that. And also, as I mentioned already but wanted to re-clarify, this wasn't a planned thing. No one had any speeches written on tiny scraps of paper that were nervously read with shaky voices and shakier hands. But it was an intervention nonetheless.

The REAL scheduled event of the night was that my older daughter was off that night to her first formal high school dance. She came downstairs in her formal dress, her hair and makeup perfect, my wife, other daughter, and I all watching her descend the stairs, and I reacted the way parents have reacted for the last 75 years. "Oh!" I said to her. "I have to grab a camera and get a picture of you." I took off for the office, and was back in 10 seconds with the camera in my hands, powering it on and adjusting settings on it while I walked.


My daughter, meanwhile, reacted the way many children in that situation have also reacted for the last 75 years. "I don't want my picture taken," she said to me when I looked up from the camera.

I wasn't surprised by her statement. She has NEVER liked to have her picture taken. This is a child for whom we have a dozen videos of from when she was 9 to 12 months old, and pretty much all of them end the same way: She either crawls or creeps or walks over to the recording video camera, and the last image the camera captures is her blurry single eyeball looking into the lens just before she places the lens cap over it. So her reticence was nothing new.

"Come on!" I told her. "You'll never have a first dance again. Stand over by the fireplace so that the light from the windows isn't behind you."

"No!" she said, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that this was more than her usual reserved self. "You'll post the picture on your blog, or put it on Facebook or something!"

I stared at her for a moment, considering what she said. And then I smiled. "Not if you don't want me to. I won't post anything online at all. Just let me get a picture of you so that I'll be able to remember it."

"No," she said. "I don't believe you."

"I promise! Come on. Stand over here by the fireplace."

"No," she said. "I still don't believe you."

I was stupefied. "What do you mean you don't believe me? I just promised. When have I ever broken a promise to you?"

She didn't respond to that question (For the record, I don't think I ever have). Instead she said, "You're always writing stuff about us on the Internet, and you're always putting up pictures and stuff. I don't like it."

I was very surprised by this statement. True, I had written blog entries about the family before, in the past, but my wife had confronted me about it more than a year ago, and I had dialed the family blog stories WAY back. I rarely wrote about my family anymore at all in my blog, and when I did, I knew it was innocuous stuff that no one could get upset about.

Or at least that's what I thought.

"I don't do that," I said to my daughter. And I turned and looked at my wife.

She had a grave look on her face. "Yeah, you do."

I looked at my other daughter. "You don't feel that way, do you?"

She rolled her eyes. "Uh, yeah, Dad. I do."

So my daughter went off to her first formal dance, and we didn't take any pictures of her at all. All because of this blog.

Okay, that's displacing the blame, isn't it? This blog is just a bunch of ones and zeroes floating around in cyberspace somewhere (Bet you thought you'd never hear that term used again, did you?). It wasn't because of the blog. It was because of ME, because of what I was writing on the blog.

And what did I think I was accomplishing? I've spent the last six weeks mulling this question over in my brain (You may have noticed--or may not have--that I haven't posted much in that time, and that what I have posted has been pretty impersonal). I'm writing very personal blog entries--entries that are invading the privacy of the people around me that I love--so that strangers on the Internet can read them. And what am I hoping to get out of this? What's it bringing me other than the hurt feelings of the people around me?

After six weeks, I haven't been able to come up with a good answer to that question. So I'm writing one final, personal blog entry--this blog entry--to explain why I'm not writing anymore. It's not worth upsetting the people around me whom I love. Not by a long shot.

That doesn't mean that I won't be writing blogs at all. I already contribute to a couple of different blogs, including--most prominently--my school district's technology blog (http://www.erlanger.kyschools.us/technology). And I'll continue to write those. And I'm actually working on a new blog. In addition to personal, memoir-like blog entries, this blog has included a bunch of other stuff as well, including a fairly large number of posts about the use of technology in education. In yesterday's blog post, my penultimate blog entry, I listed my favorite 25 blog posts out of all of the posts on this blog. All 25 of those posts were of the personal type, with none of them being about technology in education. That's because this new blog that I'm creating will be ONLY about education technology. I'm in the process of porting onto that site all of the entries I've written about education and technology, and once that's done I'll start writing new posts for that site, posts that are only about Ed Tech. Once I do that, consequently, I'll probably redirect the sweasy.net domain to THAT site rather than this one, and leave a link on it back to this site.

So I'll keep writing to those blogs, but as for this one, this is the final sentence.