Five Years

It started like this:

For many years I've had a quote on my home page from a rant by CJ Silverio, whom I'd encountered on USENET way back when, and whose Web page was one of the early ones I'd perused. (I had a page of my own back in 1993-94 when I was a grad student at UW-Madison, but I didn't save it when I left school. My current page dates back to 1996.) One day in the summer of 1997 I decided to check out CJ's page again, where I discovered that she'd been keeping an on-line journal for some months.

It also turned out to be the summer she was attending the Clarion West workshop for prospective SF writers, which was one of her journal's high-water marks. In late July I started noodling around with creating a journal of my own. My graphics tools (to say nothing of my design sense) were rather primitive, but I banged something out and started putting up entries on August 6, 1997.

Of course, I didn't tell anyone about them for some weeks.

There weren't a whole lot of on-line journals back then; a few hundred, I guess. I was journal #224 on Open Pages, and #28 on Often. Those Webring-based systems were the premiere method of advertising and learning about other journals, at the time. They've mostly faded into the obscurity of time, by now; I can't remember the last time I checked in on either of them.

I've never been particularly shy about making my voice heard and personality known on-line, but it was still a big step to put my day-by-day life out in the public arena like this. Plus, I didn't know if I could even keep up with it. So I wrote entries for a couple of weeks, and then joined Open Pages.

It took me a while to start accumulating hits, never mind regular readers. Back then, I didn't have counters on my pages; I only had some access logs available through my old ISP. After a few months I downloaded a free counter from the net and got better (sort of) tracking data on how many people were viewing my pages.

What did I worry about back then? Well, who was reading my journal? People from work? How much could I talk about work in my journal? How much could I talk about my friends? And I was terribly self-conscious about actually telling my friends (never mind my cow-orkers) that I was keeping an on-line journal. (Turns out this one was not as big a problem as I'd feared; only two or three people ever objected to any of the content of my journal as far as they were concerned. Of course, one of them was my Dad, and one of them was my best friend, Karen...)

I think I was particularly pleased when I learned that CJ was reading my journal. We spent a week in November, 1997 playing Riven and exchanging e-mail about our progress. I watched her Webcam to glean an idea of where she was in the game. I think I finished the game a few hours before she did, which I felt was quite a coup since she's very good at computer games. We later met on my San Francisco vacation in 1998 and became friends once I moved to the Bay Area.

My life back then seems strange to me today, though I guess it wasn't all that different, really. I was living in Madison, in my nifty one-bedroom apartment downtown, and working at Epic. I was single, and mostly not terribly happy about that, especially since I'd taken a very long time to get over a crush which had been (well) crushed during an awkward dating experience the year before. I was playing a lot of board games with my friends on weekends, and had started going to movies by myself. I spent a lot of time going to coffee shops to read.

I remember clearly sitting at my computer in my bedroom composing journal entries. I generally stayed up later then than I do now (not because I'm getting old and decrepit but because I get up earlier), so I wrote more often and at greater length. I also have the feeling that I wrote about the little things in my life with more regularity and in more detail, since journalling was so new to me. (I've only kept a paper journal for a few weeks at a time, and never kept any of them. So really, this was uncharted territory for me.)

By early 1998 the whole thing had become old hat for me, though.

I've always felt a little awkward about the journalling "community", and have ranted about it from time to time. The notion of a journalling community seems fundamentally ridiculous to me, since, after all, journalling is a fundamentally solitary and egocentric pursuit. You might write about other journals, or about your friendships with other journallers, but when you get right down to it, sharing an interest in keeping a journal is not really a significant commonality.

Journalling communities are like any other community: A group of people who like each other and keep in touch. There are, in fact, many journalling communities, many of which I'm certain most journallers are essentially ignorant of, because they have nothing in common (besides journalling) with the people in those communities. JournalCon might be a gathering for journallers, but it only represents a journalling community, not the journalling community.

That said, I have many friends whom I met through journalling.

CJ, of course, I've mentioned already. Lucy Huntzinger, Trish Homis, Jenn Brozek, Monique and Michael Walsh have become friends of mine here in the Bay Area (and I follow and am acquaintances with several other Bay Area journallers). Several other folks have started journalling since I knew them, perhaps in part due to my own journal: Rebekah Robertson, Jim Rittenhouse, and my pseudonymous friend "Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later".

This alone justifies the effort I've spent journalling. No matter how you find them, good friends are worth their weight in gold.

On the other hand, I may be one of the least-read journallers of my tenure. I seem to have about a hundred regular readers, and only a quarter of those are on my notify list. Truthfully, I don't know who most of my readers are, though I have some local friends who read my journal (such as John and Subrata), and a few remote readers whom I've never met but with whom I exchange occasional e-mail. (I know there are a few journallers who read my journal, where I don't read theirs. I mostly try not to sweat this, as I know that there are some journallers I read who don't read me, and I figure everyone is entitled to read whatever they want. No journaller 'owes' any other journaller their patronage.) There are some journallers who have hundreds of readers - but I'm not one of 'em.

I know I have a plain, unadorned writing style - I'm never going to win any awards on that score. I don't have a 'train wreck journal', and I have few truly dramatic moments to write about. And my life focuses quite a bit on my interests. So I presume that my readers consist of people who don't read for style, and who either genuinely care about the little ins and outs of my life, or who enjoy reading about my interests.

It's a living.

My life has changed a lot in five years. I've moved from Wisconsin to California, and become a homeowner. I've dated three different women out here (two of whom I met through, well, journalling), and have been with Debbi for a year and a half now. I'm working at Apple Computer, which is a truly wonderful job which I hope to hold for a long while.

I'm continuously astounded at how many friends I have out here: Too many to keep up with, it often seems! I feel like I'm at heart a solitary fellow, but I certainly feel like I have no shortage of things to do with other people, or folks I'd like to go to lunch or dinner with. That's a great feeling, and which is probably due in part to living in the populous Bay Area. As one of my quotes in my signature database reads: "Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway."

Truthfully I have no idea where I rank in the annals of long-lived on-line journals. Somewhere in the top 100, though. CJ and Lucy and Jen Wade have all been at it longer than me. A few folks have taken hiatuses, though, whereas I've never taken one consciously. The years have taken some toll on me, though: I'm not writing nearly daily anymore, and at this point it's hard to imagine writing that often anytime soon. I'm just too busy!

Still, sticking out a project for a long time has always been a trait of mine. It's neat to think that I've been at something longer than most other folks. And I've always written my journal primarily because it serves a valuable role for me, whether it's cathartic, or enjoyable, or gives me a way to organize my thoughts about a subject. Or just to show off. That other people enjoy it is a bonus.

I've augmented my journal over time, adding my bookshelf sidebars, my Links du Jour sidebars, and most recently my LiveJournal. I'm not really sure how all those have been received, though John recently observed that the copy of Wonderful Life he loaned me is getting close to the top of my stack. I have some other projects I'd like to work on for my journal, but I never seem to have enough time these days.

So: Five years. Not a bad run, and I'm not planning to quit. It's fun to pause and look back once in a while, though.

My Mom says I should have baked an electronic cake for the occasion. I hope this entry will suffice instead.