30 days of rambling

To anyone out there who might have actually stumbled across this blog, you might notice I don't post very much. This is mostly because I don't have a lot to say. Well, that's not quite true. I have lots to say, but nothing on any specific topic. I can talk a little about most topics but I simply don''t care about any one topic enough to devote blog space to. Blogging, it seems, is best left to the fanatics. They have the passion and the focus to speak at length about one topic day in and day out. As for me? I just tend to ramble. Which, it turns out, is sort of what of drew me to blogging in the first place. I just forgot that somewhere along the line after I signed up.  Confused yet? Allow me to elaborate.

Believe it or not, social networking on the Internet existed long before the existence of Facebook, Myspace, or even Friendster. In fact, before I was ever on the Internet itself, I spent a lot of times making friends on various BBSs. So what does this have to do with blogging? Well, among the various social networks that have waned in popularity, I actually had a Livejournal before the site became overrun with Russian spambots. Unlike Facebook, Livejournal was a bit interesting in that it was more like a shared diary system. It was a long form of social interaction rather than the short form that is now trendy. Sum up your thoughts for the day in 140 characters or less. Sure, for the sake of brevity, it does have some appeal. People can give lightning fast updates of their moment to moment encounters, but it just seems to create a worse signal to noise ratio. People tweet about their dinner menu or liking causes on Facebook, as if social reform can be accomplished by clicking a mouse, it just sometimes seems so impersonal and shallow. I felt like I had a spyglass trained on a bunch of strangers' lives, but had no idea what was going on in their heads.  Then one day in a fit of Internet Paranoia I decided to delete my old Livejournal account. But, before deleting it, I found myself doing the oddest thing. I started reading it.

I had a handful of friends, and I use the term with a touch of irony as some of them I have never met face to face, and I got their updates in my feed as they read mine and it was like getting a snapshot of what the person was thinking about that day. Some days I rambled on about things as mundane as the weather to the truly wonderful such as what it was like when I just became a father for the first time. I found myself looking back on what was important to me then, laughed at my stale jokes, and wondered at how much I had changed. It was like getting in touch with an old friend that I had not spoken to in years. What's more, I found myself reading through my friend's journals and noted how much they had changed as well.

So, for the next 30 days I am going to try to get back to my root, such as they were, and go back to rambling. Sure, I am probably just talking to myself but that's okay. Even if no one else out there reads this, I at least get a record of what I was thinking about for every day.

Today, July 18th, 2011, for example, I was apparently thinking about how Livejournal actually was pretty cool in its own way.