It will be six years this July that I’ve been blogging. I started writing at Xanga back in July of 2003 because a friend of mine on a message board told me about it. It was like coming home. I had somewhere to write where I got feedback and was able to form friendships with so many of the other writers over there. It’s really more of an insular community, these people who know me there and whose blogs I’ve been reading for so long. The majority of people at Xanga now are much younger than I, a lot of times incapable of writing a coherent sentence or spelling words correctly (not that any of those things are mutually inclusive). I wrote there regularly for about three years and then life spun me into a 180 and I stopped writing for two years. Once I got my shit back together, I wandered back into my blog and lo and behold, many of my friends were still there. I’d checked in from time to time but not on any kind of regular basis. It’s a testament to our close-knit little community that many of them were still subscribed to me, even though I had been absent for so long. That’s the way it is with us there. We’ll stay subscribed to people who haven’t written in ages on the off chance they show up again. I’ve reconnected with a few people that way or found my way to their new digs elsewhere on the internet. I’m sure that’s not endemic to Xanga but it’s what I’ve known up until now.

So why am I starting a blog here at Blogger? I started using Google Reader last year because I found out there’s a whole lot of fascinating blogs outside of Xangaworld. As I’ve read these blogs over this past year and have now gotten confident enough to comment on some of them (it’s a big world out here and can be kind of intimidating at times), it’s just become something I wanted to do. My Xanga account has a content block on it so if you’re not a Xanga member, you can’t access my blog. That’s well and good for certain entries I write but it makes it difficult when I want to share my writing with the rest of the internet at large. Hence, this blog. I’m moving some of my older entries here that aren’t horrifically annoying (I’m leaving out the memes, the Andy Gibb photo essays, stuff like that).

My extremely well thought out plan (read: half-assed effort) is to cross post most of the entries I write both here and at Xanga. Anything else that’s goofy or stupid or basically acceptable only to those who know me (i.e., singing songs – which I do a LOT, writing bad haikus, work related ranting, etc), I think I’ll just keep over there. We’ll see how it goes. So for now, here’s me and the shit that floats around the toilet of my brain. Oooh, that was really bad imagery. Sorry.