half a dozen

today this blog is technically six years old. I say technically because for eighteen months it was vacant and abandoned, while I was in Canada. dear Chris did put together this little thing, to fill in a few blanks. that sort of counts, eh? we'll say it does.

I can't remember the name of the class I started this blog for, late in the evening of January 13, 2005... but Dr. Ryan Moeller was my professor and he spent our very first class diagramming a basic interpretation of the internet. servers. networks. ISPs. magic. we learned what HTTP stood for. and exactly what a URL was for. it was quite cool. I didn't realize until a year later just how incredibly basic and second-rate the design techniques we learned in that class were.

January 13, 2005 was a crazy long time ago. I was only twenty-one. I lived in the dorms east of the cemetery with a bunch of excitable freshmen girls. I'd just started dating that redheaded kid whose contributions to my life made the following summer one of great confusion and anguish. I'd only just declared myself an English major the previous semester, and I only sort of knew why.

in the beginning, this blog was just a place for all my first impressions--all my doubts and worries about the usefulness or meaningfulness of all the stuff I was learning. after that semester, I decided to keep blogging--mainly about writing (Starcustard and random short stories), school (rhetoric, more webdesign, and Isotope), and life (philosophical thoughts about my job, vague complaints about boys, and so forth). and so it continued. I'm still here. I still blog. I've settled into an at-least-twice-per-week-not-counting-the-sunday-scribbles rhythm and it's a great habit now. good writing exercise, at least. I hope.

this post will be the 510th one. happy birthday, dear blog. let's hope all these words really have made something, somewhere, just a tiny bit better for at least somebody.