A scant two weeks ago I bid you all a tearful farewell, and now here I am again, in your face, on your blogrolls (I hope, still), and cluttering up weblogs. com.

Wait, though! Before you dismiss me as yet another weblogging addict (holding up cardboard sign saying 'Links for the hungry! Will blog for food!'), hear me out. Give me a chance. I have excellent reasons for restarting:

Reason 1:

PorridgeBoy must be held somewhat accountable, with his dastardly plot to get me to weblog again. I had to give him something to pull that terrible photo of me, and he wasn't interested in sex. Well, with me that is. (Maybe it was the photo -- I really have to get one of those glamour pics...)

Reason 2:

Then there was Dave Winer's Why We Blog. There are very few things that could have interested me in returning to weblogging more than reading the following, yesterday:

From there, I want to start an outline about what a weblog is, because there's more to say. Maybe it'll be a three-column table. In column 1, a topic. For example: Fact-checking. In the second column, how centralized journalism does it; and in the third column, how it works in the weblog world. That way, if someone understands how fact-checking works in the print world, they have a basis for understanding how it works when done in the open.

I'm sorry, but this was more than a flesh and blood woman can take. I mean really -- did anyone think I would let something like this slide?

(I wonder if Dave did this deliberately?)

Reason 3

Josh Trevino had a bet with Meryl Yourish over at i330 about how long I would be gone, and I thought I wouldn't disappoint either of them since they seemed to miss me so much.

Hi dears! I'm back! XXOOXXX

Reason 4

My friends, and this time without any preface of 'weblogging'. I've had an extremely patient group of friends in the last month as I've literally bounced over every wall, and twice off the ceiling.

In particular, it was a phone call with a friend tonight that made me realize that the weblog wasn't the root of my problems, and keeping it, or not, wasn't going to make these problems go away. All I was doing was giving up something I really enjoy, and not gaining any peace in return.

(There's a long, complex, and difficult story attached to this, which would only bore all of you. So it's going unsaid.)

Yes, I do need to find a life, and today I went hiking in the woods and I didn't think about weblogging, at all. (Of course, I was very sure there was a bear uncomfortably close and I was hiking by myself, and getting a pretty good adrenaline rush from the whole thing -- but that's a story for another day.)

And, yes, I do need to spend less time weblogging and more time with my professional writing (particularly since I have a tough RDF book deadline). But as Dorothea stated:

Blog however you want, whenever you want, as often or as seldom as you want. Use as much or as little of the technology as you care to. Adhere to common blogging formats or not, as you choose. Watch the big bloggers or not; pay attention to bloglomerations or not. If you feel you need permission to do any of these things, you’ve got mine, no questions asked, not least because I don’t believe you need it.

Fucking good advice. So I took it.

Reason 5

Sex.