“I have no idea what compels me to do these things; I will never understand why I need to write about the events that other people merely experience.” -Chuck Klosterman
I started blogging just after Christmas break in late 2000/early 2001. My friend Bryan Mathews, a computer geek who was always ahead of his time, encouraged me to write entries to a software called “Live Journal” because he had built me a website as a gift and it needed content. The wayback machine capture of the site doesn’t seem to have the index page image/design on it anymore, but maybe it was cause he used Flash, which was cool back in the early aughts.
In 2002, when I was studying abroad in Taipei and interning at the Taipei Times, I was still under the impression that blogging was ostensibly secret because who would actually read the nonsense I posted? So I was quite candid on my blog, especially about my mad crush on an American expat writer at the paper. I didn’t name names, but that only made things more fun for the staff, because I later learned they started an office pool to bet on which dude it was. MORTIFYING. I ran home alone from the house party where I learned of this pool and proceeded to delete dozens of posts from my LiveJournal.
In my last year of college at Missouri (which is amazingly 10 — TEN — years ago now), I was using Xanga as a blogging platform. And as it turns out, I was using it a lot. I found my Xanga blog tonight and it’s awesome to read about how I spent my days in 2003. It made me wish I’d been blogging more over the last decade. I’m a nostalgia junkie, after all. It’s why I’ve kept a diary since age six. It’s why I love photos and photographers. It’s probably why I’m a journalist. And now, I feel compelled to recommit myself to personal blogging. Not daily, since keeping up my daughter’s Eva’s daily photo blog takes work, but at a more regular clip.
Maybe this will work, or maybe I’ll lose steam. But we’re so quippy now, with our tweets and status updates and our photo Tumblrs. I want a more substantive artifact for later, and I trust my current blog platform, WordPress, is gonna stick around for awhile.