Revival

Kevin was making some changes to his blog tonight, so I decided I should see what's left of the blogs I once maintained so proudly. This one here is my catch-all blog; old poems, book reviews, observations all seem to have found their way to this place. My other blog is more academic and contains discussions of sources I've read for school (I'm now starting my dissertation...I started this here site around the time I was taking the GRE and considering applying for graduate work at the MA level).

To think of how my life has changed since I started this blog. Or, even more scary, to think of how my life has changed since I started my very first blog, a Xanga, back in 2004. Eight long years ago. Eight short years ago. The dawn of my 20s. To think of how old I felt then, leaving my teenage years behind!

So many blogs and online journals floating around out there on the web. So many neglected, forgotten. Others still diligently updated and read and followed. What's up with our desire, our craving, our need to have others read our words or see our photos or care about the phrases and images floating around in our own heads? Or our desire, our desperate need to chronicle moments so that we can visit them again later and, if we're lucky, bring back the same emotions we felt upon first experiencing those moments?

Sometimes I get downright overwhelmed by how many experiences - from the profound to the ordinary - I want to document on paper. Or on a screen. Or somewhere more permanent or reliable than my own brain. Or somewhere that seems more permanent. I wonder how many others want this same sort of chronicle; this same sort of catalog that we can flip through, years, decades from now, and feel like our past is still visitable, navigable. Enduring. So many mental photographs I want to save forever. So many that have already evaporated. So many that haven't happened yet and even when they do, will never make their way to an archive. I miss them already.