Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Blogger

A lot of authors will tell stories about the life changing event that caused them to write. Parents, teachers, injuries, depression, ect. Not all events were life changing, and some explanations are as simple as "I've always liked words". But what makes a blogger blog? Many writers blog nowadays just because they're expected to. They're supposed to have one. So they make one. Whatever, right?

Well, no. I'm sure most people don't really care but this bugs me so much. Leave blogging and networking to the people who genuinely like it.

Strangely enough, I discovered blogging before I discovered my love for writing. I'm not nostalgic enough (or drunk) to think that blogging spawned my interest in writing because it didn't. I discovered my love for writing when I outgrew "make believe games". All around me, my friends were getting bored. They were getting sick of pretending things were there that we couldn't see. They were sick of pretending to be people we weren't. And soon enough, I was the idiot receiving blank stares whenever I asked "Wanna pretend that ___?" Even I could tell that was a no.

But I'll get to my writer-ly discovery later. Right now, I want to talk about myself as a blogger. In 6th grade, my brother discovered how to use this free website making thing. (Not blogger or any of the common networking sites. I actually don't remember what the site was called.) It was amazing. My brother made a site that a bunch of our friends shared, and everyone had their own profile space that we could do anything with.

It was amazing. We scoured the interwebs for pictures and fonts to decorate our page with and jockeyed for the daily posts on the home page.

And then, soon enough, we discovered that we could change other people's pages. Sure enough, that led to a lot of fighting, pranks, and hatred between all of us. Finally, my best friend* and I got sick of being the only two girls on the site (The majority of the attacks were against us, funnily enough) and we broke off.**

So we created our own blog. And that lasted the entire year. It was...well...awesome. Way better than the chaos that used to be our first blog. We even created pages that supported environmental causes and had themes to our duo blog posts. My friend and I basically hung out every single day after school, so on some of those days, we'd plant our butts into a chair and update the home page. It'd take a few minutes for us to choose a topic, but once one was chosen, we'd throw our opinions into the void of cyberspace. Being the awesomely techie kids we were, we even created a "Past Posts" page that held all of our previous content. Of course, it was still pretty stupid (we had a lot of Michael Jackson jokes and weird hobo impersonations) but we were in 6th grade.

When summer vacation rolled around, the blog didn't have a chance. I was off for a trip to China and she was freakin' moving to another state.

I continued blogging after that, but I moved to a shiny new place run by the folks at Google. Behold, blogger. For about two or three years, I ran another seeeeeekrit blog that I'd rather die than tell you the name of. It was nice...at first. But I, being a bit worse than the average teenager, wrote some really embarrassing and angst ridden posts. It took me a while to realize that I needed to be more shiny and positive, so I created this lovely blog and moved here.

And now I'm here, sighing like an old lady over my internet journey. Somehow, I feel like being a blogger is a part of me, no matter how many followers I have. It's not a big part of me but it's still a part of me, however small.




*My friend is awesome. I miss her a lot even though it's been almost two and a half years. Looking over this blog post, it seems like I have some sort of an issue with moving on, but that's not why I miss her. Really. She's just...awesome.

**By the way, if any of my first blog co-writers are reading this, (probably not) that dog corpse picture was SCARY. And I do not eat poop or love any of you in anything more than a platonic way.

3 comments:

  1. It's not a big part of me but it's still a part of me, however small.

    And it's an important part of you. Lovely post. Thank you.

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  2. Omg, this literally made me cry (Chloe told me to read it). I remember our website, we had so much fun, between that (and other random crap we did together) and you becoming my best friend sixth grade was like the best year of my life (minus finding out we were moving..). I still go back and read the site sometimes, and now it makes me cry and miss you and Davis so much. I guess I can't move on either cause to me you're still my best friend. I miss you soooo much (but hopefully a visit this summer will allow us to see each other, finallyyyyy). Love you <3, Em

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