Well Shit...

I've been told, by those who shall remain nameless, in no uncertain terms that my new blog SUCKS! Well, right after I finished my happy dance at hearing such wonderful news, I began to believe they were right.

It is true...and it is because I have violated the first rule of playing ball - I'm playing without heart. (Ok, so I've watched The Replacements too many times). I haven't connected with this blog and usually feel like it is lost in the ether of the internet without much point. To try to deal with all of this I'm going to try to answer the question of why I started blogging. A lot of people won't even answer this question. I know I won't answer it completely but only because I don't think I can.

So here goes...

I've had a personal geocities website since '99. I used to be part of the online gaming community. I played first person shooters and jumped into the culture like it was cool. My life got in the way and I had to cut down my playing time. When I went overseas I had to abdicate my responsibilities to that community but my site still existed as a place to put pictures with family and friends. I threw up some graphic design work and some bio pages but once I was no longer a part of the community I had once loved so much, the site was pretty much just for me.

When I got back from being overseas, I went to DC for a while. I flew home to California in June once my contract was finished. Before going back to San Diego I stayed with family for a little while. While there, I found out from my father, in the middle of an argument with my little brother, at a sushi place, on my birthday that my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. This is why I started blogging.

I went back to San Diego and tried to pretend everything was ok. I had just been tossed aside by a guy that I thought (at the time) was wonderful and unique, my roommate was getting ready to move across the country and I had to replace her, I watched one of my friends get married, the only friend I could really name that I had left was in town for the week (she had to go back to Costa Rica after the wedding). I tried to talk to my mom...just about things in general...and we fought, the same way we always did. I felt terrible. I couldn't forgive her for all of the things I held against her...even when she was facing death, I could only think of the pain she had caused. The stress of it all just got to me. The people around me knew that I wasn't ok, but I pretended still.

One night, it all welled up and I went back to my geocities site. I didn't get a livejournal or anything...I just coded a journal like I would any other page on my site. I began using it to deal with everything. I wrote on it for a long time but usually only about things that I had no other outlet for dealing with. I would write entries on notebook paper while I was out in the real world and come back to put them online. It helped keep me sane in ways I'll probably never understand. A few people read it but no one regular. They were friends that mostly did it to check up on me...make sure I was still keeping it together alright. I didn't have a counter or a tracker so I had no idea who visited or when. At that point, I don't remember if readers mattered to me.

I moved to xanga about a year ago and pretty much abandoned the geocities site because the coding just got too annoying for me to want to bother with. There were only a few regular readers there too. I soon found that my close friends were interested in how song lyrics made me feel or cute pictures of what I had been up to but they were usually involved in anything else I had done. They didn't need to read the xanga to know what I had been up to. The political or social commentary never garnered any interest from them. The limits of xanga began to frustrate me more and more but I wasn't willing to pay for a blog that only my friends would read.

I (unwillingly) left San Diego and began reading a lot more blogs online. It made me want to make my blog something more than song lyrics and rants about some student asking me for ridiculous favors. It made me miss the days that I was part of something. I moved to blogspot thinking that I could break out of the xanga box and write how I felt on things people would actually read. I was nominated to join a particular group but I have pretty much given up hope on that happening anytime soon. When that nomination came I had visions of being a member of a community like when I was a gamer. Instead, I feel like a fish out of water, trying to swim in lake much too large for my fins.

I don't seek adoration like Acidman. I seek acceptance. I seek a place in the world where I feel I belong. But I guess it is true what they say, you can never go home again...