#500 -- Now In Retrovision!

A retrospective of a personal website is unfortunately not like a cozy episode of CBC’s Rearview Mirror. There are no colourful sets, or black and white dramas, and certainly no upbeat musical numbers. In fact, it would be much more accurate to compare it to a night time stroll down a very dark alley off a very disreputable street in the bad part of town – you never know when something’s going to jump out at you and make you cringe.
To further illustrate what reading my archives is like for me, allow me to paint this allegory for you (an allegorical painting). It’s like being almost 23 years old and happening across a note book from your first year of high school, wherein, carefully taped to the first page is the first poem you ever composed. You typed it up, printed it out on your dotmatrix and proudly presented it to your grandmother, who then quietly asked your mother if she thought you might be a teensy bit suicidal.
It’s like that. Not that that ever happened to me. Not that that note book exists.

Needless to say, in the three-odd years I’ve been doing this, I think my posting technique has improved. A lot. In fact there are some things I’d really like to remove from those archives, but for the sake of being honest with myself I have not. It takes a long time to establish a blogging ethic, discovering what you are and are not comfortable with, and the ramifications of some things you thought were okay, but then turned out not to be, when, oh say, your Catholic relatives started reading (Hi guys!).

So, for your perusing-pleasure (or boredom, whatever works), here is a brief overview of the development of this blog, in honour of my having composed, now, 502 posts. Happy Landmark, Blog-o.

On the 23rd of July, 2003, I started this blog for two reasons. 1) I had happened across More Than Donuts in a completely unrelated Google search for cheap mannequins (long story) and it was the first I’d heard of this whole blogging phenomenon. 2) I had an incredibly annoying coworker and wanted to make fun of him, and entertain my other colleagues at the same time.
I named the site after a poem, and thought that it would be oriented towards self-publishing some of my creative writing.
But that was not to be.
The site has had several distinct periods during its existence. The first, where I was just finding my feet, working at OMAF, and turning 20 is a little confused, and highly sarcastic (that’s um, changed). The second, where I leave the country for a year, and completely reinvent myself and my relationship to the world, is not nearly as representative of this transformation as it should have been. HOWEVER, this was also the period in which I started majorly sensoring my content for personal reasons, and started a mirror site to which I only gave access to my girl friends. The third, which began when I got back to the country, and ended when my computer was stolen at the end of January, was largely inspired by the antics of my then-roommates.
So far as I can tell, I’m still in the fourth incarnation. Honestly I’m not sure what it’s about yet, but right now, more than any other time in my life, I feel like I have a pretty good idea who I am, if not what I’m doing.

An important aspect of this site, and one which you might not have picked up on, is that there are a lot of references which are actually inside jokes, or statements of which only a few people would understand the full meaning. My father has said that my writing (fictional) would be more understandable (and therefore, I think, more enjoyable) if I would stop being so obscure and make my meaning more accessible.
But I can’t seem to resist making the reader work for me a little bit. This may mean that only one person will ever understand the entire meaning of everything I write, since so far, of all the people for whom I have hidden meanings, only one person has ever understood them consistently. That’s okay with me. It’s just one more thing that delights me about him, my audience of one.

My mother commented the other day that this website might present a problem for me when I want to get a real job. Perhaps she’s caught on to the fast-growing trend of people googling other people (note to employers: don’t tell anyone that I told you to do this, because it might result in restraining orders, but it’s actually… not a bad idea), and it’s true that by entering my name in quotation marks you can come up with an archived entry where I actually used it. At the moment, though, despite my rants and sarcasm and my generous (if I may say so) helping of ‘tude (haha!), I doubt my innocuous little website poses any threat to anyone. I hope I can always say that about all of my creative outlets.

Here’s to the completion of 500 more.