Happy 10th birthday, T&G

I have been blogging for 10 years this month. I can’t figure out the exact day I really started because I began “blogging” using Geocities-hosted web pages that I slapped up on my old (dead) domain, theology-and-geometry.com. The Wayback Machine used to keep a bunch of my content from that site archived, but I’ve noticed over the years the amount that it indexes continues to dwindle, and now you can’t even really get past the splash page for any of the dates.

I would write a post — with hand-coded html formatting — on a basic page, and then for the next entry, create a new page for the previous post so it would link behind the first page, cut and paste the previous entry and put it on the new page and then put my new entry on the splash page. And so on. God, it was tedious. And then that November, Blogger happened. And that, friends, sealed the deal. Blogger made it so incredibly easy. And I could dink with how the whole thing looked a lot more easily than in Geocities. Also, Blogger would work on a Mac. Geocities’ PageBuilder thingy wouldn’t. Can you imagine?

So that is why my archives here only go back to November 2003.

I was a student then, a year away from wrapping up my college experience and thrusting myself into the workplace. Ugh. “Thrusting.” I lived with my boyfriend in a small one-bedroom apartment — with a laundry room! — that we paid $425 a month for. We had two ferrets. We had a rule that at night we would only watch things on TV that were nonviolent, nonthreatening and nonaggressive. I played video games. I wasn’t speaking to my sister and I don’t remember why. My family’s political incorrectness was really novel and annoying to me then, and made me question my DNA origins.

I worried constantly about grades and assignments and all three of my jobs. “I am tired of working 51 hours a week” is a thing I wrote, and EL OH EL because if I could drop into my 2003 self’s dreams I would laugh in her face about thinking that working 51 hours a week in college was going to be the last time I would work so hard.

It was a sweet little life. Not without its trials, of course. I sort of wish I had used my time in college to break out of my comfort zone a little more. Travel more. Sleep around, maybe? Do a lot of mind-expanding drugs? I don’t know. I say I should have done those things but I am pretty sure I would have felt completely ridiculous even trying to have some kind of typical wild college experience. I’ve been middle-aged my whole life.

So here’s to 10 years of writing it down. Gonna aim for 10 more.