…do weird and heart-stopping (and temporary, thank the Great Pumpkin) database outages at your web host only happen at the precise moment when you just log in to check something right before bed?
Oh well. it inspired me to do overdue backups of all my site databases. And it’s not really all that late.
The website turns 21 today. It doesn’t drink. I sometimes do.
Always hated those “I have nothing to say so why am I still doing this?” posts that have been so common on blogs the past few years as even the most committed among us have moved most of our (ahem) commentary to social media platforms or abandoned it altogether. But this is probably going to be one of those posts. Deal.
I find that I don’t want to write about current events, because current events are too horrifying and require much more analysis than I can or will give them at this point. I don’t want to write about my own life because even though I find it quite satisfying and amusing, I can’t really imagine why anyone else would. When I want to quip or to share something with “the world” I’m more likely to do it via Twitter and if I want to communicate something with my friends and colleagues, I use Facebook as often as not (although I could see myself being off that platform except for work before too long).
Actually, I’m creating a lot of content in other venues. In addition to two Twitter accounts, I’m adding content to Groceteria with a frenzy not seen in over a decade. My work (the thing I get paid for, that is) has resulted in a significant body of content, for which I’ve been awarded almost $350,000 in grants over the past five years. And I’ve published three articles in professional journals this year, one of them in perhaps the most prestigious journal in my field. I’ve also been traveling quite a bit and developing crushes on new cities–Louisville being the most recent–and I’m planning trips for August and October. I may do the traditional Toronto and/or Montréal journey a bit earlier this year to accommodate a trip to Dublin (or Seattle and Anchorage, or Winnipeg and Chicago) in the fall.
So it’s not like I’m sitting around doing nothing. I guess this platform is just the one that has to suffer right now.
Thanks again to those of you who for some reason still drop by from time to time.
And I actually am planning a “crushes on cities” post soon. A very introspective one. Really.
I’ve just been saying more on Twitter than anywhere else because I’ve been really busy. A lot going on at work, plus I made a weekend run to Baltimore a few weeks ago.
And I’ve been spending a lot of my free time working on Groceteria, both on research and on the site itself. It feels really good actually having the time and inclination to do that again. I didn’t realize quite how much Id been missing it. I’ve been doing things here and there over the past couple of years, particularly for the past six months or so, but my activity level is way up now. And it really helped keep my mind occupied this weekend while all the shit was happening in Orlando…all of which just gets weirder and weirder.
And speaking of surreal: Der Fuhrer is in town tomorrow night. I’ve already planned ahead so I can avoid leaving the house till all the buildings stop burning and the street fights end.
Sigh. Should’ve emigrated when I had the chance…
So yeah, twenty years ago tonight, I logged onto my dialup connection and used Fetch (which I still use on occasion) to upload the original set of HTML and JPEG files that became the first version of Planet SOMA (now Otherstream). A lot has changed since then–the fact that the site no longer runs on static HTML and I no longer have a dialup connection, for example–but it’s still here after twenty years, even if far fewer people care nowadays, so I guess that’s saying something.
Maintaining this space since 1996 has done some really good things for me. It’s how I met some of my closest friends and it also led pretty directly to a midlife career change for me. It’s gotten me laid several times, and it got me married once…even if not till death did us part. It’s given me a record of an interesting period in my life and helped me frame the way I thought about that period, and it’s resulted in no small number of adventures.
In recent years, the traffic and the content have been diminishing, which is to be expected because the personal website/blog is not the cutting-edge medium it once was, because social media has taken over many of the roles a site like this used to play, and frankly because my content has become less interesting to a wider audience. The proportion of posts that mainly involve me babbling about me has increased, which is not really a good thing.
But I don’t care all that much, really. While I’d be lying if I said that reaching other people is not important–otherwise this would be a diary rather than a public website–it’s always been more about amusing myself than amusing anyone else. And it will probably continue to be that way until I decide it’s time to stop. Until that time, I hope you’ll keep coming by, either here or here or here or even here. And many, many thanks to those of you who already do, and especially to those of you who have been doing so for a long time. I appreciate it.
Back to the fun…
Let’s just say I visited some very dark places in 2012. I’d love to say I handled it with my usual good humor, but that might be a stretch. Maybe the best thing to say is that I lived through it. And lost weight. What i really hate is that the big entries on the site stopped being about anything other than me. The big anniversary comes on Wednesday.
I thought this one was going to be harder to put together than it actually was. which says, I guess, that I’m finally over the worst year of my life. Or that I’ve gotten better at ignoring it. Or something.
In 2011, I lost two of the most important people in my life. Neither of them actually went away; they both just changed in ways that drastically altered our relationships. My ex and I split up after almost ten years, and my mom developed dementia. I’m not sure the website ever quite reflected how devastating this was to me. I actually wrote more about the latter than the former, but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the proportionate effect of each. Sharing specific details about the breakup didn’t really seem fair or appropriate, although it is possible to read between the lines de temps en temps.
Despite everything, I was very successful at establishing my new career during 2011, and my October trip to Canada (the start of a new tradition) resulted in a lot of positive changes for me, not the least of which was the fact that i started listening to lots of new music again.
For the record, some of these posts were made public after the fact and did not originally appear in this same order (basically I “sneaked” them in retrospectively) so regular readers may have missed them.
In 2010, I got my first tenure-track position (which is working out quite nicely, thanks), my ex and I recommenced living together full-time after five years of the bicoastal thing (that didn’t end well at all), and I didn’t write much of any consequence. Highlights follow on the march to the big anniversary on 13 January.
Past the halfway point now, and only eight days until the anniversary. Highlights and favorites from 2007 (the year I started grad school and actually started working toward having a real career) follow. I have to admit very little of it is especially entertaining or inspiring.
Back to one year per day as we move toward the big anniversary on 13 January. 2005 was another pivotal year as it brought my departure from San Francisco and return to the East Coast. Highlights and favorites follow.
January:
Febtuary:
March:
April:
May:
June:
July:
August:
September:
October:
November:
December:
