2450 Blog Birthday!

Monday, June 22, 2009

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than
those who falsely believe themselves to be free.”

----------------------

Today is this blog's fifth birthday! It all started on Friday, June 22, 2004, on AOL Journals, as a way to pull myself out of the long depression I was in after Jay's death. My first ever blog entry is here.

There are two pieces - the earliest incarnation is "Moraine", which I abandoned when AOL began adding advertising to people's private journals, and then transferred the content from AOL to Blogger when AOL journals died. Moraine contains entries from June 22, 2004 to November 16, 2005. The second piece is this one.

At first I wrote a lot about frustrations left over from my work life, then I wrote about the relationship with Jay, and the brain cancer battles. In mid-2005 I started dating, accidentally, and the next year was filled with confusion and anger over Roman's perfidy. If I had any sense, I'd delete all those posts, but if I'm going to mention intelligence, I ought to balance it with stupidity. Those were some of the most exciting posts, anyway.

Well, it wasn't entirely stupidity. I predicted that when Roman's mother died, he'd break up with the other woman within months, and then he'd want me. He did break up with her three months after his mother's death in January 2007, and he did tell me that he was wrong and realized what he had lost and that he wanted me back. Unfortunately for him, I had just met The Man.

Roman and I are still friends, sort of, but the relationship pundits are right. Maybe it could work if neither of the parties wanted to start up a romance again, but when one does and the other doesn't, it is strained. And no, even if The Man disappeared, I don't think I'd turn to Roman. I see a lot of things now that I didn't see before.

The blog has evolved. I go back and reread old entries, and I marvel at some of them. I had things to say! Philosophy and religion, psychology and sociology. Passionate diatribes and arguments. I don't do that much any more, don't write much about my thoughts any more. Either I've already expressed everything I've ever thought about, or I've become more reticent (yeah, sure). I don't know what's going on.

I think this is the point at which most blogs die, when the bloggers start to think there's nothing more to say, when they wrack their brains trying to think of interesting things to entertain their readers. I'm not about readers. I'm not trying to entertain anyone. This is entirely for me. I have no desire to quit. I'm getting older, and frankly, this is my memory aide.

I do have a private diary on my hard disk, where I do explore what's going on in my life and my mind. Speculate. My original intent was to keep that one current, but I actually update it only once or twice a month. I rarely go back through entries. I don't know why. I often dig through the archives here.

(One argument I have with Blogger is that the archives are difficult to navigate. If you click on a year in the archives list, you'll get not the earliest posts of that year, but the last month. You have to use the "older posts" link at the bottom of the page to get to the prior month, 11 times to get to January of that year. I think Blogger should change that. When you select a year from the archives, it should then generate a list of months from that year. Too bad they didn't ask me for advice.)

So, happy birthday, Blog. May you have many more.
.