What do you get when you combine an often introverted thinker with an occasional social butterfly, a frequent perfectionist, a wide range of interests that range from computers to genealogy to philosophy to cooking to Detroit and then some, and that introverted thinker has read articles which state a blog must have one focus (and only one focus)?

You get a perpetual lack of inspiration, resulting in a blog that is never updated, save for the quarterly post apologizing for the lack of updates. Fun stuff, right? Aren’t you just itching to add that to your Google Reader feeds? Well, don’t let me stop you – go right ahead.

The last several weeks (okay, months) I’ve been asking myself what I should be blogging about. I’ve considered blogging about computer programming. I’ve contemplated writing about Detroit. See, I love these things. But, I should really only pick one. After all, sources typically say if you write about too many topics, you end up alienating your readers.

Oh crap… My readers? What readers? I think I have … five?

You hear the sound of screeching brakes as Samantha’s fingertips recoil from the keyboard.

While I completely agree with the concept of having a focus for a blog, I can’t agree that it should be that way with every blog. After all, like the theme of the 70′s and 80′s TV show said, “Now, the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum; What might be right for you, may not be right for some.” That’s right – it does take Diff’rent Strokes to move the world.

Maybe having a single-focused blog on programming, cooking, Detroit, or grasshoppers works for some. But there’s others of us out there that can’t live in boxes, even if they are boxes that we really enjoy hanging out in the majority of the time. I love programming. I love Detroit. I love going out to new restaurants. I love coffee. I love paper. I love pens. The list goes on and on and on… and on. I just can’t see myself writing about only one of these things on anything resembling a frequent basis!

Now, don’t get me wrong – I read several blogs that focus on only one thing. My Google Reader account has over 200 feeds at any given time. Most of those feeds are focused on a single topic, such as creativity, Perl, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, computer programming, and productivity. I enjoy reading these blogs, but apparently, I don’t enjoy writing ‘em!

So, I think I’ll leave the topical blogs to those who write them best. And rather than trying to fit into a mold of what an article says l should do, I’ll take the risk of alienating my readers. I’ll step out on that limb and let them get to know me – tell them about the great restaurant I ate at this weekend or about how disappointed I was today when I found my favorite pen to be out of ink. Maybe I’ll talk about banging my head on the keyboard as I wrestled with a JavaScript file to find the rogue curly-brace that was blending in with all the others.

The fact is this: I rarely focus on the same single solitary subject for very long. How can I expect to blog in a way that does not reflect how I live my life?

And with that, I hope that you, too, will live out loud and march to the beat of your own drum. After all, it does take Diff’rent Strokes to move the world. (Yes, it does.)