In the Beginning

I think I was early to the scene as far as reading and hunting for blogs went.  I started back in around 2002-ish and was addicted.  I remember my mom rolling her eyes at me whenever I would start to talk about my “Internet people”.  I guess to her it seemed like being a blogger meant living your life in a fishbowl. I saw it as something else.  In just the same way my siblings and I were told as kids to shut the blinds at night “Because we don’t live in a fishbowl!” bloggers have that same ability. They get to choose when they open the blinds and what they are going to show you inside.

The ability to be reading the thoughts and experiences and day-to-day narratives from regular people out there in the world with such diversity and a dash of bravery for sharing basically melted my brain.  I was hooked.  It was a liberating moment to find ridiculously creative people out there with wit and humor to boot!  And though these voices I kept coming across were older than I was, I felt connected.  I felt like I had found a tiny niche of my own in a world which was hurtling through so much conflict and confusion.

I remember my first recipe site which I was totally just tickled pink with.   Bitchen Kitchen just made my day with its playful colors and retro-influenced design.   It would still look quite snappy if it had survived past late 2005/early 2006.   I going through some crap at the time so I lost track of it and when I remembered it just this last year, it was dead and gone.  Apparently a victim of one of the less awesome parts of the web: the vanishing.  Domains can expire, interest and resources can wane, time moves on and things vanish.

mp3.com.  I found some of my first indie music there, which I loved, by The Secret Band.  The album was called “Special Little Devil” and I downloaded the four tracks that I liked the best with the hope of buying the CD eventually.  mp3.com was purchased by CNET and the catalog was dumped unceremoniously and I couldn’t locate any of their work again.  The Velvet Teen emerged from that group and I contacted a band member for details on where I could get a copy of their earlier work but he said he wasn’t sure they still had it.  My favorite song of theirs, Rivena, has a great sound to it and somehow over the years it was corrupted in the shuffle between computers and is now truncated awkwardly.

I also remember, quite fondly, Beth from Crazy Us and her stories about her sons Kyle and Eli.  I’m dying because I had printed out a short story she posted once regarding a conversation she had with her kids over breakfast which I may have lost in my last move.  The whole thing was just ridiculously amazing, but my two favorite lines which I think I have down to memory verbatim go: “I am a bunny rabbit!  A poisonous bunny rabbit.  I will poisonous you! Hisss!” and “We play animal friends simply every day!”  It was at that point that the concept of having children, which had been totally icky, gross and foreign to me suddenly popped into focus as something I may be interested in doing.  That was a landmark moment for me.

Crazy Us has popped in and out of existence since then.  It wasn’t a daily read for me but I checked it frequently enough to kindof put together that Beth had difficulty dealing with some of the feedback and criticism she would get from visitors to her site.  This particular issue has actually been always there in my mine.  There are the dooce’s of this world who have gone so far as to monetize negativity, but that takes a LOT of energy and a lot of patience and a lot of self-confidence. Then there are really awesome people like Beth who get worn down by it and I don’t blame her one tiny little bit.  I’ve always wondered how I would fare in the same situation.

I guess the moral to this story is that the internet is very much a living, breathing thing in its own way.  It evolves and grows and things are lost in the shuffle.  It’s a double edged sword.  The amazing ease with which content can be shared and people can connect with one another also lends itself to the rather quick loss of that same information if not actively maintained.  I think that is why I love physically published media.  It doesn’t go anywhere for the most part.  It’s a lot harder to delete and repurpose the constituent parts of a book or photo album or a handful of letters than it is to delete a website or flickr profile or email to free up space.  That being said, I love the power of the internet as it enables me to share what I can, unless you know of a publisher who is just dying to deal with me and publish my crap incrementally!