I blogged before anyone I knew called it blogging.  All of my friends blogged, actually.  On Xanga.  Yes, I know.  Many of you savvy bloggers and blog readers out there are gnashing your teeth at the screen and ready to hunt me down and bash me over the head with a Styrofoam bat.

I joined in 2003 for perhaps the only reason anyone in my high school joined any blogging community: to pester each other outside of the eight-hour class days.  In its final incarnation (as you can see in the picture on your right), it sported lyrics to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall.”  I’m still quite fond of the blue, and, erm, blue theme I managed to piece together with Xanga’s own “Look and Feel” option (I did have an image-map based theme at one point, but that took far too long and I did not like the look of the i-frames).  I know white text on a dark background is frowned upon in the Web 2.0 atmosphere, but I was I supposed to know that as a sophomore in high school?

The best thing about Xanga was that I had fun.  I had a way to paste some parts of me on the Internet, even though my only comments came from my friends.  I was writing for them.  Actually, I find it quite humorous that when I was stuck at home with a 100+ degree fever I could post a plea for homework assignments on Xanga and expect a response.

I also found it interesting that, on the very first day of my blogging life, I somehow had the instinct that no one (outside of my friends) would read my blog if I wrote, “K! Thx! Bye!” on every post.

On the first day of blogging, I wrote this rambling post about acceptance:

Everyone knows loss and pain and suffering.  Human beings are human beings.  Plain, simple, and yet a fact that many people don’t want to accept.  I mean, isn’t that true?  There’s a poor boy sitting in the corner, rocking on his feet, first on his toes, then back on his heels, back and forth, back and forth.  Would the girl swishing her hair and smiling at the boys imagining base images about her even want to admit she inhabits the same genus as the rocking specimen, much less the same species?  Don’t we, as humans, want to disown those who aren’t the same as us?  Those we consider freaks?  Why is that?  Acceptance is being taught everywhere, so why isn’t it being squashed out?  The answer, as I see it, and you probably don’t agree is that somewhere, in almost every human being, there is a small piece that doesn’t want to accept.  Doesn’t want to accept that we could be the same species as the pathological cases that were some of the most horrific dictators of all time.  And I’m not talking about racial or sexual discrimination, either.  I’m talking about the need to distance ourselves in history from people our ancestors (with good reason) truly despised or followed.  Also, I’m talking of the need to distance ourselves from what we don’t want to be, like in the example earlier.  But the main point of this rambling that probably makes no sense at all?  We’re all human beings.  So then… why is that statement so hard to believe?

Yes, it rambles.  I like to think I’ve improved since then.  But, in some ways, if I thought blogs were only about writing detailed moments of my days, down to the number of times I used the restrooms between science and math, I would have been bored out of my mind.

And I probably wouldn’t be blogging today.

Posted on November 27th, 2006 by Joy
Filed under: Blogging