Blogging, But 23 Years Ago
Down the rabbit hole of old Blogger posts
Do you remember life online before social media? I thought I remembered, but my memory isn’t exactly true. Oh, it was better. It was more pure. It was still about meeting new people and staying connected with friends, but despite the seeming complexity of making friends on a blog, it was something I remember as pretty wonderful.
I was twenty-nine in the year 2000. Just out of a marriage to a good guy but the wrong guy. I was dating, so my public persona was something that many others might see. But my memory of what I posted is filtered with another twenty-three years of social media layered upon it. What I didn’t remember is blogging being quite so—confessional. So raw and out there. This became patently clear when I opened up an email earlier this week from Blogger.
This email address has a legacy Blogger account associated with it that hasn’t logged in since 2007. In 60 days it will lose access to the account and associated content; the data will be permanently deleted unless migrated to the Google Account system.
Huh? I thought I had closed that down years ago (16 years, to be exact) when I migrated to WordPress (and have used a few other blog services since then). I managed to recover the account and found six blogs listed that I still owned. A couple were empty. A couple more only had a handful of posts (one was a health blog where I was trying to live a healthier life, and another was a poetry blog). Two had blog posts (780 of them!) worth gawking at. But first, I had to get them off of Blogger for good. I exported the .XML file and deleted them from the site. Then I hit up ChatGPT to parse through the .XML and make it readable as a text file (the images I cared most about I still have in other places, from what I could tell). Then, I had something readable. The posts go back to when I first started on Blogger in July 2000. My VERY first blog post ever.
Published: 2000-07-20 T21:21:00.000-07:00
I am sleepy.
And perhaps a bit stupid. But dammit. I got this thing to sort of work and that was the goal. Now my contacts are plastered to my eyes, I'm thirsty as all hell and my cat is annoyed because I've ignored him all night. All for this.
For this.
My second post was a bit better, if a bit snobby. And it's really nice to read now because I spent some good WhatsApp time with Greg just the day before I found these posts. Wild to think so much time has passed!
Published: 2000-07-21 T06:04:00.000-07:00
Coffee.
I am not quite an addict. Not quite.
I remember the last time I saw my friend Greg before he went off to China to teach English...nearly four years ago now. It was in a charming coffeehouse in Seattle near Greenlake. We sat in the modern art chairs with our big huge steaming white mugs sipping our frothy lattes. How many times had we drank coffee together before? Hundreds of times.
Coffee drinking in Seattle is akin to some sort of worship. Every little latte stand is a sort of mecca...at all hours of the day you can find people milling about, anxious for the taste of that brown liquid love. Coffeeshops are always full of interesting people, conversationalists, book readers, lovers. In New England, Dunkin Donuts is king. It's not the same. You can't sit in a Dunkin Donuts and feel cozy or smart. There IS a sort of person that hangs out in Dunkin Donuts...and I'm not sure I want to know them.
This week has been a triple espresso week. It's the sleepy thing.
After that, I posted often. Sometimes, several times a day. The posts were about anything and everything, ranging from a “bitch test1” that I took, to complaining about doing the dishes, about my meanie boss at work (Rob, if you are reading this, it was about that person at EZ!), and the oil class that I was taking.
Many of the posts are very personal, mentioning friends as though everyone knew who I was talking about, whether it was hoping my friend Niki’s cat Clyde got better soon, or a deep talk that I had with my colleague Payman, or a conversation I had with Greg on Messenger (because he was in China, remember?). The whole idea of privacy—and other people’s privacy—wasn’t something I worried much about. The nefarious bad actors weren’t so pervasive back then. I didn’t seem to worry about my bosses or friends reading things and making assumptions. It was two years before Heather Armstrong (who sadly died earlier this year) would be“Dooced.2”
There are strange little posts that I wish I had context for.
Published: 2000-09-15T20:54:00.000-07:00
so misty
i love you sis.
And this one. My favorite, because it’s the post I made the day after I met Joe.
Published: 2000-10-02T10:53:00.000-07:00
things that rock
Van Gogh, especially this one in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. ~ sangria ~ sunny gorgeous days ~ sleeping in and being languid ~ that i live near a sign that says Fresh Killed Chickens (wonder if they would do roosters?) ~ toscanini ice cream~ a ring that looks like a cherry ~ sexy jesus woodcuts ~ learning how they accidentally(mistakenly?) discovered white zinfandel ~ being able to type 90wpm ~ Poi Dog Pondering ~ having frog legs for the first time!! does NOT taste like chicken...
Here is the Van Gogh I mentioned. We had our first date at the Fogg specifically to see this piece. We also saw a magnificent Albrecht Dürer exhibit and Joe explained there are two types of Jesus in art: sexy Jesus or emaciated Jesus (Dürer went for Jesus with the six-pack abs3). Then we went to Dalí in Cambridge for dinner, hence the sangria and frog legs. There was a painting on the wall behind me of a topless woman with her arm across one breast and her hand holding a ring that looked like a cherry over her nipple. Joe also schooled me on my bad white Zinfandel habit (the shame!). We also went to Toscanini’s for ice cream, and then he stayed for two days.
Reading back upon many of the posts, I’m shocked at how much I overshared. Everything from the first time I lost my virginity (aka really bad sex), to how much I hated my ex-mother-in-law (to be fair I am still scarred from that, 24 years later), struggling with money, being laid off twice and having to temp for $15 an hour, crying on the phone with Sallie Mae because I couldn’t pay my student loans, freaking out about money, my anxiety about my upstairs neighbor selling drugs…it goes on and on. I have always been a bit of an open book, but I can’t imagine it now, not with the world as it is, with cancel culture, with identity theft, with people believing they can say whatever they want to you without consequence.
Reading these feels like a gift, a time capsule from my past. They’re different than a diary, but at the same time, still deeply personal. It was a different world…one where people talked to each other on the phone, and spent more time together in person. I love seeing all the things I was interested in, happy about, and I especially love reading about my evolving relationship with Joe, from meeting, to dating, to marrying, to being together beyond.
And finding this again was also a gift. It’s a moment with my little kitty Romeo that I remember so clearly.
Published: 2002-01-15 T11:12:00.000-08:00
last night
i was in a bit of despair. I found myself taking a shower as soon as I got home from work, mostly to relax and escape from my feelings. Strangely for me, the shower has always been a haven for my emotions...maybe because I can cry and wash the tears away at the same time. When I was divorcing or in the troubled years before the divorce, I found myself crying there because no one would know that I had been crying. But last night, I was home alone and thinking about money (and the lack of it) and the bleakness of the job market, my dissatisfaction with my body, my lack of a career, my dead creativity, and a whole mess of other miserable things. I was crying, and talking to myself aloud. Next thing I knew, my kitty was there...he had pulled the door to the bathroom open with his paws (he can only do that if I don't latch it firmly) and he was trying to get into the shower stall with me (he HATES water...he has NEVER done this before). He kept pushing his head against the curtain but was hesitant to step into the water. And the hollering! Yowling, yowling. He sounded so frantic and he was trying to figure out how to get to me and he was so frustrated by the wall of water and the thin, translucent plastic curtain. I found myself desperately trying to get the soap out of my hair so I could shut the water off, towel down and calm him. Funny because he was trying to get to me to calm me.
He was trying to tell me that it will all be okay.
I remember this moment because it was so unusual, a moment in which my little kitty knew I was scared and upset about money, and he was desperate to comfort me. It told me so much about the power of animals and also the message that he wanted me to know: It will all be okay. And it was.
I’m in such a different place now. All those things I cried about that day in the shower have done a full 180. That’s not to say there aren’t challenges, but oh I wish I could go back and give that version of me a hug. I would tell her to listen to Romeo. Because it really does all turn out ok.
This test declared that I was 44% bitch. And it mentioned that the bitchiest age group is 29 year olds. 29 year olds average 41% bitchy. Also, pithy revelations such as: women who like the taste of beer are more likely to cheat on their boyfriends. Canadian women are more likely to consider themselves successful, and girls with tattoos like authority less.
Heather was the first person to be fired for the content of a blog, in 2002. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Armstrong
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/heather-armstrong-dooce-friends-bloggers-share-legacy-rcna83998
WHAT’S BRINGING ME JOY THIS WEEK
This cartoon:
This photo by Bob Adelman - Andy Warhol Shopping at Gristede’s on Second Avenue, New York City (1965)
This electric house of the future:
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I enjoyed the Westinghouse video! It reminded me of the things we saw when we visited the Worlds Fair in NY when we were kids.
Crystal, I love this. And it’s such a nice reminder of how we can see our younger selves in what we’ve written. We just have to keep it! (Or find it again through a platform, as you did!)