Back in Action

I'm blogging again! Gosh I've missed it.

Near the end of high school (or maybe the summer after?) I started my first blog. Blogging was the hottest thing going in 2002. Blogrings! Aggregators! LiveJournal (is now Russian, apparently?)! DeadJournal (was around for a minute)!

Mine was on Xanga. I named it "Demeter" after both the "Cats" character and the Greek goddess. Because I liked "Cats" and I took Latin, and I thought that was pretty clever. You could create your own "skin" for your blog, and in mine I wrote all the headings backwards. Again, I was very clever. I posted regularly, and occasionally I'd even include a picture, which required a cable connection to my digital camera and some light HTML.

Xanga wasn't really a social media site like we have today, but you could subscribe and comment on other people's blogs. I made a couple of friends there. The person I commented back and forth with most regularly, Jenni, was an English major. We didn't talk after the site disappeared, but she went on to create a bunch of nifty creative writing and mixed media projects. Last year she died of a brain tumor.

A few years later I decided I needed a "real" blog, so I got my own domain, prepoceros.com, and put a WordPress site on it. Prepoceros like in the Ogden Nash poem. I wrote and wrote, through some of the changey-est times in my life (you can see I'm out of practice with the words, and also I haven't slept properly in almost a year (spoiler!)), when things were amazing and confusing and sad and new and exhilarating. Some of my friends read it, and maybe a few strangers from time to time, but really the blog was for me. The process of sorting through my thoughts and making paragraphs out of them gave me a home base and a creative outlet. (I maintained a YouTube channel for a few years in this era, too, and it served a similar purpose, while reaching a slightly larger audience.)

After a while I posted to my blog less and less often, especially as my daily routine pivoted to Facebook and a smartphone. (Pretty sure no one says "smartphone" any more.) At some point, I don't know when, my domain registration expired, and the site is now some SEO click-farming Indian lottery thing? At least once, while Prepoceros was active, I downloaded all my posts, so I have a partial archive around here somewhere, thank goodness, but the later posts were lost.

Between then and now I finished college, went to law school, passed the Bar but never practiced, got married, got divorced, worked at a startup, played a lot of taiko, got married again, had two kids, and bought a house. The toddler and baby account for the aforementioned lack of sleep. Now I work in oil and gas in a job that's not ideal but comfortable enough, and I'm trying to survive this pandemic day by day.

I stopped using Facebook almost completely when my first child was born, and I haven't missed it much. My podcast habit, which started on a literal iPod in 2005 or so, has really picked up in the last few years. I enjoy it, but it's completely passive. I want to create things again. So here's one thing. Well begun is half done, they say.