Obligation vs. Desire

I joined “Art of Travel” three weeks later than most Buenos Aires bloggers, and two months after everyone else in the class. Due to my tardy arrival, I was a bit behind on the posting schedule, and I was told that I would need to blog every four days to catch up to speed. At the time, this task did not strike me as particularly onerous. However, every four days is much more frequent than one might imagine, and I found myself finishing a blog and realizing that I was already due for another post. As academic obligations, travel plans, and sheer negligence intervened with my posting program, the blogs started to pile up.

blogging can be stressful

I found myself in April still having 2/3’s of the posts to complete. It became necessary to devise a new blogging schedule, one which basically meant 1 post per day. After a few days of this routine—I was exhausted. I lamented to my friends on how difficult it was to write a blog each day. And then I realized something—this is what bloggers actually do. Once I started to approach my circumstance as a real blogger-type experience, rather than the unfortunate result of procrastination, my daily post became a wonderful thing.

Because the Buenos Aires semester is not synchronized with other abroad programs, some of the assignments didn’t always match up with what was going on in my life. I figured that since I was already so far off schedule with the blogs, it wouldn’t really matter if I posted a little out of order—according to what prompt concurred best with my lived experience.

Blogging with the freedom to respond to the full range of assignments, under a sort of time crunch, was actually very exciting. And I put a lot of effort into making my posts meaningful, and hopefully fun to read.
The one thing I wish worked better was the response process. Though there might have been a lack of time and desire, I thought each person’s blog would have been more meaningful if there were several responses to each post, and a dialog between those responding and the original blogger. Nevertheless, it was liberating to get my ideas out there.