This blog and my blogging history
Posted by Joel Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:26:40 GMT
(I wrote this a few weeks ago while in a rare mindset, but decided to wait and see if I would still want to post it later. Tonight, I feel like posting it.)
Just realizing, looking at my blog tonight, how many gaps in time there are, and how much I leave out. Really, the only reason I don't blog regularly is laziness. I should clarify that, if it isn't obvious, I got shaken off my fitness routine after moving from Marc's place, which was where my gym was. Which is why, six months later, I'm still about the same level of fitness as when I last posted my progress.
I've been thinking of taking the whole fitness thing seriously again but have honestly been pretty lazy about finding a gym that fits within my routine. I know my productivity has increased dramatically with time, and yet I still look around and see such a lazy person when I think of what I really have to do.
I've gone out in the city a number of times to dinners and shows and clubs and bars, played Guitar Hero and Rock Band for the first time, tried playing Eve Online with Goonfleet for a while (I've now quit). Dad visited SF for a few days, twice during the last six months. Mom has also come up twice, with Anne once. I have even had a girl or two on my mind for the first time in a while. That's probably surprising to me because for the year I was in San Jose I barely ever saw any.
And then, you've got to consider all the stuff I don't dare mention in this blog. Man, there was a time when I was younger I wrote too much in these things. And I still catch myself doing it. Every time I look back a year or so I think "My God, why did I write that on the internet? That's there FOREVER now!" My natural recourse is to delete the blog, keeping it in my private records, not posting at all for a few months to a year, and when I feel the urge to blog again, start a fresh one.
This blog only goes back a while, but I've been blogging since I was around 14 years old, in 1996. Simply updating some webspace I got from our ISP with an HTML page I coded up. Heh, I've been doing geeky stuff on the internet since I found out about it. I have them all still, all except one year which is lost forever. I deleted the only copy because I spent the year fawning over some girl, airing my family and romantic business online, being overly dramatic. But now, I really wish I hadn't lost it. Even though I can't stand to read my old blogs because they're so embarrassing. Maybe when I'm 50 I'll look back fondly, I don't know.
I don't know if life will ever feel quite as passionate as it did back then. But I'd say it's getting better. To discount that things are getting better is to fail to acknowledge how bad they've been.
This weekend we did karaoke, that was a lot of fun. It was the Affinity team, at Kamna's place. Afterwards we went to a club, but I like a complete dork had my laptop still with me because I hadn't been home since work, so I went home shortly after arriving.
(And this part, I wrote tonight.)
More people than I think have probably Googled me and read through this thing, and my Twitter messages, and so many other things. I don't know what to say besides that this blog seems like a poor description of who I am. Maybe I'll change that. Maybe I won't.
I have severe doubts that anyone can run a website demonstrating clearly who they are to everyone who Googles them-- potential bosses, dates, and curious friends included.
I don't think this blog is a misrepresentation of you. It's an incomplete picture, for sure, but nobody ever fully reveals themselves to anyone else. No one can know the whole you, or the whole me, or the whole anyone. I think that's a good thing.
Hell, most of the time, we don't even know ourselves completely.
In response to the part about blogging since 1996, I think you had about a year on me, but yeah, I've been doing the same thing, and I regret like hell that I didn't save all my old websites and all my old livejournals and GeoCities, and whatever the hell else. And I definitely aired my dirty laundry in most of those places. Having an "online boyfriend" is a product of that. We eventually met, but the start of the relationship was definitely online. That's what I call class. shame
The internet has been such an integral part of my life for the past decade-plus, and losing track of any of that is sad. I miss my old chat logs, too, from my chat-based roleplays back in the day, when I would rush home from school and RP for 6 hours.
Ah, memories.
First order of business... Holy crap is that Katie Pertle!?! How have you been?
Anyway... I can't put a finger on any one reason I stopped blogging. Mine lasted almost seven years, but after I finished grad school the desire to continue it faded. I felt like I had fallen into a cycle of rehashing the same topics over and over again and that I wasn't really adding anything to it. There's only so much the average reader wants to hear about skydiving and how my classes were going.
The second half of 2006 was easily the darkest time of my life, so that might have been a good time to write, but neither of my computers ran reliably enough during that time to get through an entire entry (I tried a couple times, losing one entry to a failing motherboard on my XP machine and another to a failing power supply in my iMac. I just about threw the keyboard across the room both times.) so I never posted one.
These days I'm enjoying myself quite a bit and, for whatever reason, don't feel the need to write about it. :)
No, it's Katie Klemp.
Ah... yeah I suppose that would make more sense...