Blogging for blogging's sake, part two

I'm trying to decide if I want to give up blogging or at least give up NaBloPoMo. It was gads of fun while I had friends doing it with me and we read and commented on each other's blogs. But part of the reason my blog title says, "comments optional" is because when I first started blogging outside of Myspace, I found that there were lots of bloggers who seem to be people who need lots of attention and comments on their blogs are practically required and they snub you if you don't play along. Wow...that was a long run-on sentence, but I guess it's ok.
 I did not know at first that there was etiquette involved in the whole comments thing. I usually did my reading of blogs while lying in bed before falling asleep and because I usually had my laptop up on it's end, reading it while I laid on my side, it was very difficult to comment. Commenting required sitting up and typing and then lying back down. I only commented on those blogs which really made me think or struck a nerve. I was blissfully unaware that I was breaking any rules or etiquette.
That first year in NaBloPoMo I was surrounded by a bunch of "mommy bloggers" that all thought they were the cleverest, funniest, smartest mommy bloggers around. Many of them were quite caught up with themselves and my question was always the same....where are your kids. Those delightful kids that you write about everyday are obviously not sitting on your lap while you are spending hours on the computer making the perfect blog. And I started to feel quite disdainful toward these perfect strangers who somehow while running a house and family found time to write blogs and comment on blogs and live, breathe and eat blogs. Were they all hoping to make money? or? I never knew because I eventually distanced myself from them. I got tired of seeing their pictures that were starting to seem contrived and having them beg for votes for this or that and then I got really annoyed when they started showing pictures of the mess the children made while they were blogging their lives away. I was a stay-at-home mom while my kids were growing up and I'm not sure I would have ever had the time to blog while my children were babies and toddlers.  I barely had time to myself to go to the bathroom. I did pursue some artistic things, but after the kids were fast asleep in bed.
Over the years I have continued to blog, mostly because I like to write and it's good typing practice, writing practice, grammar practice and hopefully will keep my brain nimble and free from dementia as I grow older. I  don't really write for others and I say I still don't care about comments, but I do think that comments at least let you know that someone is reading your writing. But then do I care that someone is or isn't reading my blog? I often think I don't care, but sometimes I find I do care. So I have no idea what I want to do now with my blog. Do I want to try and start reading other people's blogs again and commenting in an effort to make myself "known" and therefore generate a reader base, or at least an occasional reader base? Will that put me in that same category of the bloggers that annoy me with their needy ways? Do I want to change to just journaling for journaling's sake and leave the reader base out of it all together? I don't know. But I do wonder if this will be my last NaBloPoMo. They have moved to Blogher, which at first I thought was a great idea. Now, I'm not so sure. I don't think I like Blogher. It is way too much stuff on the page with way to many ads and I really have a hard time knowing what to do when I get there. It just seems all jumbled up to me. I have tried several times to go there and make sense of it, but it is much like reading a catalog to me and I've never been able to really read a catalog. They just make my head hurt. I have to look for a specific item if I want the catalog to make sense. And, in the case of Blogher, I have no idea where to start. None. So that is my blogging for blogging's sake tonight. Do I really want to continue with NaBloPoMo? It's just not as much fun as it used to be.