Happy Birthday Bloggie!

I was gonna post this yesterday. But, I was busy doing other stuff. Hanging out with my man (watching "About Schmidt" and being silly) until his meeting, then grocery shopping, then grabbing Wendy's to go, then picking up Joe from the meeting, and then eating and more silliness, then home and early to bed. So I did not get to post the birthday post on my blog's birthday. But... maybe today is REALLY my blog's birthday. November 6, 2002 is the date of the first entry. But that one is basically just "Hey cool! It works!" Because I'd spent an entire day tweaking the blog template, making it look right, and then rearranging my entire website to fit in a "blog" link button... The first REAL entry was posted on November 7.

When my blog was born I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do with it. I'd toyed around with the idea a little bit, which I got from Greg's blog "The Vortex" (and also his girlfriend Hilary's blog). At that point I didn't really know of anyone else who had one, but I thought it was kind of a neat idea. I wanted to make my own though, programmed by me for my website. I didn't want to have that silly "powered by Blogger" button sitting in the corner. But finally I gave up on that idea, having not the time nor energy to write my own blogger client, and decided it wasn't "beneath" me to be "powered by Blogger" and besides, if perfectly good, usable programs already exist (AND are better than anything I could write myself)... why reinvent the wheel? I signed up on Blogger and named my my newborn weblog "Moo". That is still its name (that's why it says "moo" in the upper left-hand corner of the page, in case you never knew) but mostly it just goes by "Blog".

The day my blog was born was the same day that FTP was turned off on the Computer Science Department server by Bruce-the-freaking-retarded-systems-admin-who-deleted-the-student-directory (although this was back when he was simply Bruce-the-Idiot). How odd that I would choose to create a blog that uses FTP on the day FTP is banned. Well it gave me something to complain about, and besides, FTP was turned back on the very next day because so many people reamed Bruce out for being, as we like to say, a complete idiot.

But anyway, besides giving me one more reason to make Bruce turn FTP back on, the blog was something to keep me busy. This was back last fall when I was dating Ryan, shortly after we had "broken up" for the first time. The complete website rearrangement necessitated by the birth of my blog gave me something to do for long hours in the lab, back in the days when Ryan spent all his time in the lab playing games and I spent all my time in the lab to be near him. That's how our relationship was. Joe said that's how we seemed pretty much "back to normal" last fall -- we were both back to spending long hours in the lab, ignoring each other, like we always did. (The farther away from that relationship I get, the weirder it seems to me. What did I see in it?)

But I digress. Once the website and the template and all the spiffy buttons and graphics were set, I had my very own blog... and then there was nothing to do but write in it. Strangely enough, I wasn't sure at that point HOW to write in it. Like, Greg's blog a lot of time would have philosophical-type stuff in it... what he thought about this thing or that thing -- he did a lot of writing geared to an audience. I think at first I was going to try and do something like that -- write for my audience and have profound ideas and breakthroughs. But I realized right away that it wasn't going to work. First because I had no audience. Second because I'm really not a "profound ideas and breakthroughs" kind of girl. Whatever it is I was trying to do, it wasn't "me". The voice coming across wasn't mine, and it didn't seem right. And besides, I didn't have an audience, so it seemed stupid (and a little cocky) to write for one. :P So it was off to a slow, bumbling start.

The following week Poetry Lady gave us an assignment in Fiction, to write down 3 things that made us happy and 3 things that pissed us off every day for a week. Mostly I think just to get us writing every day, because good writers are supposed to write every day. For me though... it gave my blog a purpose. :) Only for a week... but I started to get more comfortable with the idea of writing in it.

By December I realized no one was reading it (or so I thought) and I was fine with that... it evolved into a journal, that just happened to be on my website. I was only writing sporadically, but it was something. I had journals in middle school (spiral notebooks, I still have them) and I'd write at night, but I grew out of that around the time I grew out of bedtime. Typing is much faster and more convenient than longhand, especially when I'm on a computer most of the day anyway. So... I was writing when I needed to, whenever I felt like it, and saying whatever I felt like saying. And so it has been ever since.

At times it's been a challenge. I write like no one's reading, but people are. For the most part I don't mind but sometimes I do. The policy of the blog is honesty. I write my honest feelings about this or that, I don't make stuff up, I CAN'T because that would destroy everything. I had a journal once where I wasn't completely honest with myself or my feelings. There weren't many entries in it. The few that were there got torn out and thrown away so I could use the book for something else. Everyone lies to themselves sometimes. But I can't do it when I write.

A month or two ago I actually removed a post I had written because it upset my mother. But I put it back up the next day. To leave it down, to replace it with an apology, that was the ultimate form of self-betrayal, self-denial. To let anyone have that kind of power over it took away everything, and I had no outlet. The blog is my outlet. I write what I feel, what I need to say. I don't post everything I write, but once I do post it I don't go back and change it later. Once it's posted it's there for life... it took one incident to reinforce the importance of that to me.

This thing is almost sacred to me in a way. It is irreplaceable. It isn't always profound or even interesting, but it's special. It enables me to go back and see what I was thinking at certain times. What was going on a year ago. How it felt to break away from a long-term relationship. The ups and downs of beginning a new one. Coming clean about things... questions about faith... questioning myself... breakthroughs on love... the occasional rant. High points, low points, memories. These are precious to me, just like those idiotic journals I kept in 6th, 7th, 8th grade, which are totally and completely stupid, yet they still reside in the drawer of my nightstand where they have for the past ten years.

I like to think honesty is why people like to read these things. Mine, in particular. I put more stuff in mine than many people do, or I have in the past. It isn't everything. I don't post as much really "personal" stuff about my relationship with Joe, that is, the bad stuff, the hard times we've gone through, the arguments we've had, as I may have with Ryan. Mostly because 1. Joe and I actually TALK, and 2. Joe reads this, and 3. (going along with 1 and 2) I'd rather Joe hears important things directly from me, rather than reading them here first. And it's not that Ryan didn't deserve that too, we were just pretty far gone by the time the blog was born and never communicated well anyway... something I have made an effort to correct since I've been with Joe. Although the fact that Joe actually listens to me is somewhat of a help. :P

Again I digress. :) I guess what I'm saying is: some things are too personal, or too important, to put in here, at least without talking them out first. When things are down I don't write in here as much for that reason. It's hard to explain... I write like no one's going to read it, but at the same time I'm writing to share a bit of myself with someone. Sometimes it just seems pointless to write things down only for yourself. Anne Frank addressed her diary to an imaginary person. I did the same as a middle-schooler. It's really no different now. Yes... but no. I guess... I think people, even if they don't specifically address themselves to anyone, write things down because they hope someone will read them... whether for an audience now, or with a thrill that someday, long after they're gone, someone will come across their little diary and open a window into the past. Maybe it's narrow-minded thinking, but I cannot see any reason to write things that you truly never would want someone to see. Writing it down makes something real, and sometimes that can be dangerous.

In the past year a lot more people I know have gotten blogs, which I read on a fairly regular basis. They can be insightful, and they're addicting for the same reason reality TV has swept the nation: sometimes real life is far more interesting than anything a sitcom could dream up. People have their blogs for all different reasons, and they write their own little things in their own ways. Some are similar to mine. Some are more general. Some are more cryptic or philosophical. Some are completely made up. Everybody does it differently.

I have noticed that the trend, at least among my friends, is to use Live Journal. It does have some cool features. The "friends" thing, for instance. The ability to leave comments. The profile, current music, current mood. But, I like Blogger. I like that Blogger FTP's my blog directly to my server... from what I can tell, LiveJournal doesn't do that, at least not for free. I don't really need the other features. I've considered adding a way to post comments, but, I honestly think that would just make me paranoid. People know how to contact me if they've got something to say. :)

Besides, "blog" is such a way cooler word than "journal". :D

So... that was long and rambly! But, it's my blog and I can ramble as much as I want! I HAVE been, for the past YEAR! :)

Happy birthday bloggy, and here's to many more.

Thanks for reading. ;)