A year ago I was home for Christmas vacation and I had just read through Jessamyn’s archives. I was telling Carl how much I liked her journal and how much I thought that maybe I could do something like that too and how much fun that would be. I even knew about a service that would let me host the journal for free and wouldn’t make me have to know HTML. I had gone to Shark Valley the day before, and so I wrote about what we’d done and there it was, the first entry, just like that.
I was in a horrible temp job working for a crazy person, and then I was unemployed. Various people came to visit me, and I went on a trip or two myself. I had a birthday and I went on a lot of job interviews and I pet the cats and baked a lot. I was in my first real bellydance performance. I cut my hair short. I got a job and got a lot of electrodes stuck on my head and learned to hypnotize. And here I am back in my hometown again, waking up late and eating yummy food and spending time with my sister and my sweet mother, seeing old friends and riding a bike to the beach.
I’ve done some good stuff and had a lot of good times, but I have to say it’s been a tough year in many ways, and I haven’t been completely able to share that here. I decided not to be anonymous for a really stupid and self-aggrandizing reason: I knew I wouldn’t have any readers if I didn’t tell my family and friends, and I didn’t want to be typing into the void. Relationships are more important to me than anything else, basically, and so I’m not about to write anything here that might jeopardize any of them. That has occasionally left me with slim pickins’ in terms of writing material; I’m all: “Huh, well, don’t want to write about childhood issues or about my relationship or about work details or about family stuff…hmm. Guess I’ll write about board games and being a whale! Whee!”
I think I thought that by my one year Ampersand Anniversary that I would have made a bunch of internet friends and would constantly be emailing hilariously and I would be getting tons of hits per day and maybe get nominated for a Diarist Award and that my writing would get better and better and that all of a sudden I would be…something else, I guess. I don’t know if I’m something else today than I was a year ago today when I was writing about alligators. Well, obviously I am, but I don’t know if it’s because of this journal. I do know that I usually love writing here, even when I’m embarrased about what I write, or even if I think I could do better if I wasn’t so shy about baring my inmost soul, or even if I think that everyone on my links page is better and cooler and smarter and prettier with better accessories than me. This is filling something in me that has been empty for a while. So that’s that. That’s enough. Thanks for reading. Talk to you later, okay?