happy blogday!!

My goodness, the time sure does fly. Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of this blog!

Honestly, I never thought I would see this day. See, I'm not a writer. Yes I work in publishing, but I took the job because I love to read and thought it would be wicked cool to work with books and whatnot. But create one of the damn things? Nah.

Writing journals has never been my cup of tea either. I have tried to do the diary thing about seven times in my life, always to peter out in a month or less.

The best I've been able to do in collecting any set of compositions is to have an empty journal that I could pick up and open randomly to jot down feelings and thought processes. Yes, there is poetry. And no, you will never see it. See how good I am to you?

I can remember when I first learned what a weblog was, it was the summer of 2004, and every time I heard something about the presidential race the media kept saying "blog" this and "blog" that. Normally I'm pretty technologically savvy, but somehow I was late getting on this particular boat. My friends explained the concept to me, and that was that.

Until I started to know people who had their own blogs and started to read what they were writing. Then I found more to read, and more and more and....by god I wanted one!

Problem was that I was concerned about potential confidentiality issues. How fair is it to discuss personal details about other peoples' lives to an open audience? The last thing I wanted to do was hurt anyone's feelings or break any trusts. Or get fired. So I decided to just release my web address to friends living out of state. People vested enough in my life to understand what I was saying, but far enough away not to risk any potential conflicts of interest.

Again, what kept me going, how is this thing still alive? Plain and simple, people kept reading. There are just a handful of regular readers, but knowing someone, anyone has been interested has kept me talking. How often do you really get a devoted audience that comes just to listen? For an extrovert like me this has been a dream come true!

It is more that that though. There is the support that my friends have shown me in the rough times, and the shared enthusiasm in the good. Really, the best gift of all.

Now, a year later, I realized that pretty much what I write about is harmless to the people here who surround me. And I only had a couple of posts that could get me in trouble at the job. So I did my job post cleanup and have outted my blog to all locally who are interested.

One thing I have noticed in following other people's blogs is that sometimes the personality that I read does not match the personality of the person I know. It is delightful to see this other aspect, but do others feel the same way about me? Is there a different side to the coin of Rockstar that people have never seen before?

I suppose now that this site is no longer anonymous I'll find out! Welcome to the dark side...