Gettin’ my blog on

Once posted elsewhere, it’s here now as some sort of starting point for me.

I’ve fought against actually having a real blog for a long time; it’s always seemed such a self-masturbatory thing - you write, your friends comment, but little actually gets accomplished. I imagine that for some people writing is cathartic, that they don’t really understand what’s going on in their heads until they work it out on paper (or this crazy-new electronic paper that’s been going around).

I actually had a small blog long, long ago - when I was in high school. Nothing ever really got accomplished with that except a bit of familiarity with the basics of web design (which means that instead of learning things for the first time I have to re-learn them, as what was commonly accepted in 1995/96 is far from what is used today). It was a very basic E/N page - movie quotes, funny things I’d found browsing around, a near god-worship of Stile (back before it just became a page to sell porn). Nothing important. I tried again at some point in college - it was an angsty time in my life and I did in fact write some entries that I’d be quite embarrassed to show people I know today. Okay, 90% of them were things that would embarrass me to show to other people. Thank god it’s gone.

However, it’s not really for me. The emotional cathartic writing, that is. I do most of my emotional thinking in long brooding sessions involving beer or whiskey, sitting on the balcony and listening to Bob Dylan sing. Smoking is often involved as well, but as I’ve recently quit again I’m going to leave that part out and imagine it’s never been important to me. God do I miss smoking. While I do have sessions like that occasionally, they are very few and far between. Generally it’s a very life-changing situation that needs to be dealt with, or an emotional black hole that needs to be wallowed in for a while before emerging newborn into the sun, covered in an afterbirth of cigarette ash and beer sweat.

My life over the past few years has been highly shaped by listening to other people’s problems. I find that by talking to them, thinking through the problem as they explain it, I get a really good idea of what’s going on in my own head and my own life as well. I guess in some way I’m using other people’s problems as a way to solve my own. It works suprisingly well, I’ve found. However, as my friends scatter to various parts of the world, I’m left with an ever-shrinking group of people to really hash things out with. I can sit and listen to lots of the kids at New College still, but few of them really know me enough to trust me with anything that we can really get into as far as feelings or difficulties.

So, perhaps I’ll write things instead. Maybe I can see some good in this whole weblog thing-a-ma-jig. If I do, though, I’ll probably have to move over to my own server Editor’s note: Server moved, then again. Yay bandwidth.; this lack of control is going to drive me a little nuts. Also, I’ll try to keep it emo-free. Please feel free to kick me in the junk (or at least give me the ham sandwich) if I start to slide too far into emotion. Reserved discussion is fine, emotional outbursts are not.