Anne Truitt Zelenka

When I was a baby, just two or three months old, I cried. I cried and cried and cried ’til my mother wanted to shoot her head off… or maybe mine. She thinks I was bored. Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet, so I couldn’t keep my neurons engaged with that, and I wasn’t old enough to read. I hadn’t learned to type yet either. What a horrible fate, to be a child unable to surf the Web or read a white paper or publish a blog post.

Even worse, try being a child’s full-time caregiver. If you want to know sheer tedium, head out on a blue-sky Denver day to dinosaur park with a three-year-old. While everyone else you know is skyping and tech.memeoranduming and meebo’ing and trying out Google’s new calendar, you’ll find yourself navigating preformed playgroups where all the moms know each other or counting another ten pushes on the swing or encouraging your small human charge as she climbs to the top of the spinosaurus for the first time. You’ll wonder what’s happening with OPML Camp and did Dave Winer quit blogging, really? And what did Shelley and Kathy write lately, because they are so totally orthogonal to everyone else—you always start thinking new thoughts when you read what they write. And they’re women. Perhaps that’s part of their orthogonality, except they’re even orthogonal to each other, so is gender really a good way of cutting up the world? You wonder: do you want to keep working with BlogHer or is it making you ghetto-ize women bloggers in your RSS reader and in your mind? The answer is that is that you do not want to continue, so you decide to resign and decide to quit momblogging. You think about reimplementing your tech blog in WordPress and redesigning it to look professional yet quirky and eclectic, just like you think of yourself, ideally making the blog (and your professional self) look as good as something Rachel Cunliffe might cre8te.

I suppose if you were to take a three-year-old to dinosaur park on a blue-sky Denver day every day for the past, I don’t know, infinity days then you might have a different experience, because you’re not me. I bet you’d be bored, though, because someone who likes to read and write about technology is not necessarily someone who likes to take small humans to a playground multiple times a day.

Then my husband came home early one Friday. So I poured myself a glass of wine. Sat down in my office. Listened to RedMonk Radio. While I listened, the oldest kid asks, “are you making a movie?” because he’s obsessed with claymation and the husband asks, “are you watching a webcast?” and then the husband takes the younger ones to watch a lacrosse game with the neighbors. I think of making claymation RedMonk analysts. Then, settling into the podcast, breathe a sigh of satisfaction and nonboredom and relief. Ahhhhhhh. James Governor says “drive the boringness out” and I thought, “I’m going to drive the boringness out and start blogging again because blogging forestalled boredom better than anything else I’ve done.” Anything except programming, and so perhaps I should start building software again if I can ever find someone else to take this darling child of mine to dinosaur park.

Can you imagine when you’re sitting on a plane on the tarmac and the engines start to rumble? The engines start to rumble but the plane doesn’t go anywhere, not yet. That’s what it sounds like here in my office. My brain’s engines are rumbling but it’s going to take some time to take off into that blue sky even though I’ve got lacquered Vendome furniture from Crate & Barrel and an Aegean rug too, plus a shiny new MacBook Pro, all sitting in my own office that has doors. It has doors. My office in Maui was open to all: to the family room, the kitchen, the constant interruptions of my kids. Now all I lack is a babysitter.