Dive, thoughts, down to my soul

It's been a while since I did this whole blogging thing. Stepping back into it is rather like...I want to say stepping into a minefield or testing the temperature of the bathwater with my big toe, but both of those metaphors now strike me as supremely stupid.
Let's start over, shall we?
So it has been a while since I last attempted anything in the vein of a blog. My last blog, hosted by Live Journal, was a pathetic thing. I'd post essays on literary criticism and receive nearly zero response. I had maybe one or two regular readers, and they only read my shit because I had known them IRL (which translates "in real life," for those of us who still cling to the usage actual words). I had a number of irregular readers who posted comments like "What a great resource! Keep it up!" in response to my essays on literary criticism, which made me think that people were cannibalizing my essays for school reports, which pissed me the fuck off.
I had a lot of trouble handling a blog. Emotionally speaking, that is. I'd sit by and stare at my inbox, waiting for the copious comments to whatever wisdom or witticism I had posted that morning to come rolling in. Those comments never came, and I started to feel cheated and unappreciated.
I had thought that blogging would be the ideal means by which I could connect with my fellow man (and, I was very much hoping, my fellow woman). A forum where people will only judge me by my words and my ideas? Where I, as a person who fancies himself to be intelligent and literate and eloquent will shine among so many lesser, duller narcissists who spew their thoughts out onto the Internet? Yes, sign me up! Oh God, your very Heaven is no more than this!
A blog, I realized, is a piss poor way to achieve validation. At least for somebody as socially clumsy as I am, who has trouble making and maintaining associations whether on the Internet or off of it. As I browsed around the blogs of others, I saw that most of them were only connecting with pre-existing friends. Some were part of communities based on shared interests, but mosts of these interests were not my interests--I had no desire to participate in the anna positive community or one of the many Naruto fanbases or to hitch my wagon to the Fallout Boy fanclub. A few rare individuals had such command of language or ideas that they actually attracted discriminating interest from the outside, but these were rare. I thought I could be one. I can't.
So why am I doing it again? Why am I even thinking about blogging? Why am I typing out my thoughts in the full expectation that no one will ever read them instead of working on my homework for this coming Thursday? Well, I'd say it was the tequila I drank this afternoon, but I reckon I must be mostly sober by now. I think it might be because the attraction of plotting out all my interests in my profile in the slim hope that somebody will think I am cool and mail me to compliment me. Or it might be because typing my thoughts out in journal form, if nothing else, can serve as an organizing principle for my otherwise disorganized mind. Or it might be because I really hope that people will read what I write and connect with it and so we shall create this vast network of sympathetic and sensitive souls across the planet, and none of us shall ever feel alone ever again.
Yeah, right. Well, I don't know why. I'm willing to attribute this desire to demoniac possession. Seems as good an answer as any. In any case, here you go, Intarwebs. My very first new blog post. Anima Umbrae is back. And he certainly has a lot of other things he could/should be doing, instead...like working on his campaign website on Obsidian Portal, or reading up on pedagogical methodology in the writing classroom. Or sleeping.
Sleep. Yeah. How about that. Well, good night, Intarwebs. Sleep tight. Don't let the programing bugs byte.
Ohhhh. That was some witty shit right there.