Hello, blog.

“Remember when you used to blog?” a good friend recently asked.

Well, at least I recall this being recently, but upon further reflection I realize this was at least 3 or 4 months ago. Possibly longer.

In any case, I replied, “Yes! I do remember blogging!”

It’s hard to forget eight years of fairly dedicated updates to my old LiveJournal. This was before the days of the Great Facebook Takeover. It was a gradual takeover, and for awhile, we maintained dual lives; Facebook to catch up with those who did not blog and to get quick updates, “LJ” to get the details. Eventually, Facebook even snatched up those early adopters of social networking from their safe little LiveJournal havens, forcing them into the free-for-all world of inane updates like, ”I had oatmeal for breakfast, but not the instant kind!” or, “three more days till Friday!!!”

It used to be you had to work to get to those one-liners, buried in musings about how we spent our weekends, painfully verbose descriptions of people and events, listing out our lives in the way outdated methods of communication like letters do. Now you can take a picture on your phone, send it to Facebook, and not have to say a thing. You don’t even have to use words to comment on the photo, you can just click a thumbs up sign and “Like” it. I suppose Facebook has made us all lazy.

But, before I get, as my friend Jeff says, all “get off my lawn!” on the advancement of social networking, I simply wanted to say this: Yes, I remember blogging. And I miss it. Now that I have a working rough draft of a novel, I'm looking for more outlets to practice writing. I thought back to my early days of blogging, which was manual style journaling (you know, with pen and paper) and even further back to my very first diary. It had a puffy cover with a rainbow on it. Which gave me an idea. What if I were to go back through my old diaries and journals and reflect on them? Surely my life has been full of enough humiliation to glean a bit of a comically tragic coming of age story. Plus, I distinctly remember drawing in the margins and sketching the names of my favorite bands, so at the very least, that might be entertaining.

My first charge is to get the box of journals out of the closet to see what I'm working with.