About a million times a day, people ask me how to find time to blog when their lives are so busy. “I know blogging is important, because my followers depend on me for information about what I’m wearing, how I look, and what things I hate. But lately, I’ve been so busy eating egg rolls and buying things with which to make more egg rolls, I just don’t have the time!” Don’t worry, I’ve asked blogging expert Julius Q. Ranceworthy how to make time for your most important information-sharing sport, and boy did he have answers!

T: Mr. Ranceworthy, you’re a busy professional with eight children and a medical career, not to mention your hobbies of vintage automobile restoration and charity work. How do you find time to update your blog fifty times a day?

JQR: I found it quite difficult after the triplets were born, but how could I abandon my followers? I simply made some adjustments: instead of waking up at 5:45, I never went to sleep at all. I fashioned a helmet with a Blackberry inside so I could blog while I worked on the undercarriage of my ‘39 Packard, used a projector and Braille keyboard to blog from bed while my family slept at night, and rigged up a dictation device so I could slip in a few Tweets when nature called. I also started taking pictures of my sandwich on my lunch breaks at the clinic, just for filler.

T: Wow. And when you’re at the soup kitchen?

JQR: I get a lot of material from the folks who wait in line. I just record them, then set their conversations to Philip Glass for my mixtapes of socio-economic commentary.

T: Do you ever feel conflicted about that? Do they know they’re being taped?

JQR: If I told them, they’d just be silent, or slurping. That wouldn’t help my blog at all.

T: That’s true. Do you find you’re sacrificing time with your family in favor of your virtual presence?

JQR: Never. Usually, I make sure they sit around me in the same room while I blog, and encourage them to talk amongst themselves until it interferes with my thought process and I yell, “Shut up, everyone! I’m working!” That’s when we get our real quality time, everyone silent and fiddling with throw pillows until I’m done clacking away. Sometimes I’ll put on a soup kitchen mixtape to make sure that they understand the gravity of my art. Usually at least one of them cries. Music can be so powerful.

T: Your wife has a blog too, does she not?

JQR: I don’t read her blog, it’s base.

T: How so?

JQR: She’s not a professional blogger, like me. Her template is impossible (sideways scrolling? Hello?), and she really slacks off. When she was giving birth to the triplets, I kept saying, “Sally, this is a huge moment. This is a moment to be preserved on a blog. I’ll hold the laptop, just give us a play-by-play of this Cesarian.” She became violent, and that’s when I realized where her priorities had gone awry.

T: …

JQR: Obviously, I wasn’t about to mess up our lives, riddling the story with gaps and question marks and unhappy emoticons, so I live-blogged the whole thing. The nurses kept asking me to cut the cords, but I had just gotten a new MacBook Pro, so obviously I wasn’t going to get blood and placental detritus on the enter key before I’d broken it in properly.

T: Thank God.

JQR: I did, for the WiFi.

T: Have you ever encountered internet hate? I imagine you have.

JQR: Obviously, every important blogger does. Even the not-so-important ones do, because they do stupid things like insult my lunch photos. I find that it’s easiest to search for their email addresses and subscribe them to spam, and then to deliver them pizzas until they cease and desist.

T: They have to pay for the pizzas. That’s horrible.

JQR: No, I pay for the pizzas in advance. But they have to eat the pizzas, or throw them away in an already-full trash can that they then have to take out in the cold. And I always order from Pizza Hut or the restaurant with the least stars on Yelp. And the pizzas are covered with anchovies, pineapples and goat cheese. And olives spelling out “BACK OFF MY BLOG,” or just “I HATE YOU,” depending on the offense.

T: So sometimes, your feelings get hurt.

JQR: No! I’m a professional!

T: Right, right. So, do you get paid to blog?

JQR: Not yet, but I’m certain that one day, I will. And at this point, I’m the mayor of several pizza joints across the country on Foursquare, so sometimes I get free breadsticks, and my autographed photo graces many grease-stained walls. You can’t buy that.

T: You sort of did buy it.

JQR: But only sort of.

T: Are you blogging right now?

JQR: Whenever anyone asks me that question, I ask them, “Was I just doing anything?” If the answer is yes, or even if it was no, then yes, I’ve been blogging. Otherwise how would anyone get an idea of how busy and full my life is, every second of every day? What if I missed something important that holds the key to the character arc of my entire life? What will my great-grandchildren think of me, unless they can follow my doings over the course of years and years of events? How will I prove I existed, when I need to prove it (which I will), if I haven’t backlogged everything? And what about when I lose my memory? I’d have to rely on my wife and children to remind me of how nice a day I had on July 2, 2008, or what I ate last Tuesday. They might not be paying attention, but I am. This way, if I ever lose track, I can find solace in the fact that I wasn’t losing track at the time. I don’t know how anyone does anything without proof anymore. What did you eat for lunch last Wednesday?

T: I don’t remember.

JQR: I had a gruyere and ham panini. With pickles. It was fantastic. I know it was, because I said so in the caption. Everyone else thought so too. A lot of people commented, “Mmm,” or “Wish I were eating that!” The pickles were brined in envy, proxy server envy. I didn’t tell them where I got it, because it was a sandwich just for me.

T: Any last words for people who find it tough to blog when they get overwhelmed by work or, you know, if their triplets are more high-maintenance?

JQR: When you’re old, when your children have become the figures in the last verse of “Cat’s in the Cradle” and you’ve misplaced your bifocals again, you may wonder if you’re disappearing. Especially if you’re in a dark room and your television is broken. It’s a great comfort to think that you can vanish behind your former self, get subsumed by an online personality that will remain even after you have died. Perhaps a well-maintained blog can become a machine, can learn your routine and language and likeness, and will update itself, mystically and robotically, on the day you die, and beyond. Maybe I’m creating an algorithm that will troll search engines for my obituary, and create a text post the next day expressing my experience of having died. Maybe my children will refresh the page to find that I have cheated mortality, and can continue to tell them what I ate even from beyond the grave. When you think you might not have time to blog, think of that.

T: So blogging is a telephone you’ll use from the afterlife.

JQR: Of course not. Phones aren’t that advanced yet. And the death of Steve Jobs made this scenario a little less likely, I’ll admit it (see my posts from the day Steve Jobs died, particularly pages 45-62). But there’s still hope. And when there’s hope, there’s something to blog about. Also when there’s no hope. In fact, those are the blogs I enjoy the most. So really, either way, there’s fuel for the hamster wheel, and the goal is to set that wheel on fire so that it carries your soul from one dimension to the next. If you take a vacation from your calling, you might as well just lay down and die, and sell your domain to someone who gives a damn. What did you eat for lunch on January 5, 2006?

T: I definitely don’t remember.

JQR: But doesn’t part of you wish you did?

__