Happy birthday to… bloggy!

On 15 September 2004, I decided to start blogging again after a hiatus of a few years, in light of the fact that I’d been taking a web studies unit at uni. I’ve always had an insatiable need to rant about things, so blogging is the perfect outlet for me; the fact is that no one really wants to hear about 95% of the things that I have to say, so instead I say them to the unnamed “masses” (all 40 of you who regularly read) of Internetland, thus saving my ‘real world’ friends and family from having to listen to me carry on about the most trivial of issues. Only that’s a lie. They still have to listen to my incessant rambling and bitching, because frankly, I have rather a lot of things to talk about.

My earliest blogs were actually LiveJournals – and no, I’m not telling you the address, a] because it’s embarrassing, and b] because one day I might feel the need to make a weekly post of ‘things I wrote in my blog as a 17 year old’, and I want to save the material. In 2004, however, I started my first proper blog. Hosted at Blogger, this blog was initially named Cynic. About a year later, I changed the name to Muse, as I felt that ‘Cynic’ had kind of a negative vibe about it. Of course, changing the name didn’t change the content. In late 2007, after three years at Blogger, I moved to WordPress, and renamed the blog for the third time, to And This Is What I Think:. And that’s where you’ll find me to this day, though I now pay for my own domain. I still haven’t got around to learning CSS in order to customise myself a pretty layout, but perhaps that can go on my list of things to do when I get home from South America, along with training for a marathon, learning to play guitar again, and breaking out my easel and paints.

So five years on – why am I still doing this? I don’t get a whole heap of readers — numbers range between 30 and 60 a day on average — and I get even fewer comments (please guys, say hello! I’m lonely here and I like to talk!). But over the years, between the Blogger and WordPress incarnations of this blog, some 40000 people have ended up here — whether on purpose, or by Googling any of the completely disturbing things that people search to somehow end up here (the most normal searches involve hating ones PhD; the most messed up involve all kinds of depraved sexual acts and bizarre combinations of words that I don’t even pretend to understand).

I’m not in this for the potential fame or fortune; in fact, it really angers me that there is a new wave of people who take up blogging simply because they know there is the potential to earn some pretty solid cash (or freebies, or noteriety) just by writing. It annoys me that people seek out sponsors for brand new blogs (i.e. blogs with no established base, and no promise of quality writing!), rather than just writing for the love of it. It annoys me that often the most shit-boring blogs in the universe are the most popular, simply because they’re a bit controversial. It annoys me that blogging has become just another outlet to make a name for yourself. But then again, people might argue that I’m guilty of the above. Why use my real name on my blog, if not to be known? I’m not sure really. I’m just comfortable enough using my own name, that it doesn’t make sense to use an alias. If I were in this for the money, I’d surely have quit by now. This is the longest held job I’ve ever had, and it’s never earned me a cent. There have been a couple of times that I’ve considered looking for freelance blogging jobs — i.e. writing posts for other people’s blogs, or for news/networking sites — for money. But the more I think about it, the less appealing that actually sounds. You see, I blog because I need an outlet to say what I want to say — to be opinionated and get things off my chest and laugh at the foolish behaviour of those around me. I don’t want to churn out 500 words a day on whatever topic I am told to write about. I don’t want the honesty of this blog to be comprimised, because elsewhere I am paid to blog with a certain outcome in mind (i.e. say I was to get paid to write for a healthy lifestyles blog — how am I then supposed to blog here about how I ate 29 Big Macs and drank 17 bottles of wine last weekend? I didn’t really. That was an example, I promise).

I haven’t stuck to anything for five years. I haven’t even had a relationship that lasted five years. Yet somehow I can’t give this up. There have certainly been times that I wanted to — when it felt like I had nothing to say, or when I felt like writing was pointless because no one read it anyway. But really, when I think about it, blogging has been one of the best things I’ve ever started. Over the course of the past five years, I’ve documented most of the major events in my life — even if half of them are practically in code, to myself — and I can now read back over the archives, and it’s like reading a semi-coherent story written by someone else a long time ago: something at once very familiar, but still somewhat fictional — a side effect of the passing of time.

I like to think that there will be a fitting time to wrap this project up. Maybe it will come soon, or perhaps I will come up with a better idea for a blog and it will dominate, and this one will slowly just die. I think there’s a reason, however, that I’ve started many new blogs over the years, but this is the only one that has survived. It is a labour of love, sometimes so frustrating, but generally something that I’ve poured so much of myself in to, that to cease writing would be to cut off a little piece of myself and wait for it to die. Instead, it’s likely that this blog will keep going for much longer, entertaining me and documenting my life as I continue to travel the world, continue studying and learning and expressing my frustration with the Judith Butlers and Post-Modernists of this world, as I get married next year and have kids in the future, and as I go about my everyday life over here in Perth, on the edge of the universe.

Thank you all for reading. It’s been a pleasure, and I hope that you all stick around for the next five years — and seriously, say ‘Hi’ some time. I’d love to know who you stalkerish freaks are, after all