How can one not be moved, even if one has been a little preoccupied lately, when one reads something like this?  

Sounds good, and no, I haven't been ignoring Xanga. I merely haven't gotten around to Xanga, yet. Sounds like I'm not valuing my membership? Quite the contrary. I'm valuing it enough to be sure to make it meaningful.

A few months ago, not so long ago as it feels, I started looking into social networking sites other than Blogger, and found myself presented with a wealth of resources, each of which I'm exploring as time allows. While I suppose that I could test my readers' patience (assuming I have any of those) by periodically saying "and I'll be blogging here this week, and there the next", I had something much different in mind. I'd like each site I work on to be distinctively its own place, with its own purpose and character, and character is not something that can rush  into existence. I've taken a leisurely pace, allowing each site to define itself over time. Practice Sessions (my StumbleUpon blog) is sort of my online playground, on which I encounter new sites, and maybe not just tell you what I think about them, but play around with and sometimes build on what I see on them, letting myself be taken in unfamiliar directions in the process. Monday Never Comes is where I go to be a Centrist, and Darkroom Without Shadows (my DeviantArt page) easily defines itself, given the nature of the service. But what was my Xanga page about? That I had to think about, and having thought about it, I found that I had some work to do, in the real world, for what I wanted to do to become practical.

I had thought of it as being a place to post and discuss my amateur efforts at art, the journal at DeviantArt being as unsatisfactory for that purpose as it is. (I like the community, but the site offers no feed for our blogs, and doesn't allow us to embed images into the text). I might do some of that, but I'm leaning more toward this becoming an amateur theatrical journal, which is where the real life work comes in - where am I going to find the other players? Where we'd perform is simpler - outside, most likely, when weather permits, stage space being as costly as it is, and many of us being as poor as we are.  But finding those who are interested, with that special condition I set ("that they not be unpleasantly insane") is not easy. There is that awkward moment when the first person shows up, and it's just the two of you, and I have never been very outgoing in general. Getting past that first moment is difficult, and that is what I am working on at the moment.

Aside from that, I'll just see what this place becomes.