Starting Over Again...Again

Almost a year.

I haven't written anything here for nearly a year.

I don't think I've even looked at this site since I posted the punk blog. I have no memory of writing the punk blog.

I just read it, riveted. This Becky chick is pretty cool. She likes the same things I like, talks the way I talk, finds the same kinds of things interesting that I do, even appears to own the same book on punk that I do.

What a bad ass. She's my new favorite person in the world.

She said some pretty stupid shit, though, too. Woah. Way back when. Even recently. What a dumbass.

As the archives indicate, I have had this blog for some time. As they also indicate, my updates have been sporadic at best. I started this blog when I was a community college student, a know-nothing. A snot-nosed, know-it-all ne'er-do-well. I started it to entertain myself when I was working as a tutor in my community college's writing center. My primary audience, initially, was my boss in the writing center and some of her blogger friends.

Posts from that time are safe, relatively uninteresting. I was, all things considered, an internet n00b. Certainly a writing noob. I will appear less cynical, mostly, and less jaded in those posts. I wasn't. I was just worried that if I said much of what I really thought, people would think I was rotten and potentially insane.

At some point, I quit worrying about that. At some point, the cat came out of the bag, and it was no longer worth the trouble to write about pop culture, stupid things, things I didn't necessarily dislike but that didn't really interest me. Some time after I started this blog, I started blogging on Myspace. I started blogging in other places.

I was going to be a writer. I was going to network. I was going to get down to business.

I amassed followers. Fans. I was even approached once in a bar by a total stranger who stopped me, using my name, and gave me a hug, telling me how much she loved my blog.

It made me wildly uncomfortable. In hindsight, it was probably the first indication that I didn't really know what I was doing and that I might not like what I was getting into.

A little-known fact about me: As willing as I am to broadcast thoughts, opinions, incidents in a place like facebook, part of me is intensely private. I'm a secret-keeper by nature. Both my own secrets and other people's. Secretive, I suppose, is the word. In wide-open social situations, I tend to affect a persona. It's not intentional, and it's not that it's not ME, necessarily, but it's a select part of me. It's a diversion, in a way. Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain. I am the great and powerful OZ.

Sure we all do it.

Sure, it's part of being human and living a social existence.

But my persona has a distinct flavor. And usually, eventually, maintaining it wears me out.

I left Myspace because...well, in large part because it was malfunctioning a lot, and I got sick of losing my blogs.

But also because I had amassed too many friends. Too many perfect strangers. Too many eyes. I couldn't say what I wanted to say because I couldn't remember who was watching anymore. I was a writer with too many readers.

I fled. I basically quit writing, except for here, occasionally, and only really after I was convinced that nobody was listening anymore.

I went to facebook to start over. I was very choosy about who I friended. Then, slowly but surely, I started to amass too many friends again. Again, I can't really remember who's looking.

I'm not plotting a facebook suicide, but you can expect to find more of what I'm thinking here rather than there. If I invited you here, it was purposeful--deliberate. Some of you have been with me since Myspace (Darian, Eber, Listi, Lori, Amanda, so on. You know who you are, and, man, I love you guys. *sniff*).

One of you is from the way-back days of AAP--the only one who knows me primarily as a poet (what's up, Doc!). Some of you are newish to me, but nevertheless dear, so I hope you'll continue to make the trek over from time to time to read. I think when I left Myspace, I gave notice to my subscribers that I was moving, encouraging people to follow me here, but not many came along. That was kind of by design, I think; I think I knew I would lose them. But in this case, I definitely want you guys around.

I'm going to try to post more regularly. Going to try to get over my spooked feelings and normalize. I'll be done with school in the spring and that should create time for more blogging.

No need to publicize or share. In fact, please don't. I don't mean to imply that there will be some clamoring for access to my blog or that I'm all that great, but there are too many people that I'd prefer not know that I have a blog. Many people. People who you might think I wouldn't mind having around but who I really don't want around. I don't plan on posting scandal or anything. Or maybe I do, who knows. But I like to know who's looking.