Here's To My Health

It’s hard to find a reason not to admire Richard Branson.  He made his billions in record stores and airplanes, then used those billions to build himself a spaceship.  He reminds me of a playboy billionaire alter-ego of the wise-cracking comic book hero.  His blog is definitely something I recommend and for the past few days, I've been mulling over a recent post found there, “Blogging: Good For Your Health?”

“[Blogging] keeps the mind engaged and is an outlet for creativity, as well as encouraging communication.“

I think Branson’s assessment is spot-on.  I began writing my blog, The Augmentee in preparation for a 2008 deployment to Iraq as a sort of therapy; it was a fun way to deal with all the stressful unknowns presented by that unique solo deployment.  Once the blog gained a little traction among my friends and the small community of Navy Individual Augmentees, I admit I became a little addicted to the attention.  I still had fun writing it, but I had an equal amount of fun reviewing all the reader comments, obsessively watching the site’s hit counter climb, and admiring it's standing in the top-5 Google results for “individual augmentee*”

I've made several attempts to get a blog going since but they all fell miserably flat, bruising my fragile ego and failing to gain any audience.  I wasn't having any fun at all.  So this time, I’m just writing.  I still (desperately) hope people read and interact with it, but I’m not going to get all spun up about it.  Let’s see how it goes.

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* It helped that “augmentee” is a made-up, Navy word that doesn’t produce an unwieldy number of search results.