six babble-icious years

It was six years ago today that I started posting entries to Anhedonia, the Web site that my friend Columbine set up for me on his domain. Whatever I wrote that day wasn’t particularly memorable, but it was great to use a CGI script to type in whatever I liked and then hit a button and poof! All the navigation was correct and I didn’t have to hand-code a lot of fiddly little things. I could update my Web site whenever I wanted! Wow.
Thus began my foray into online journalling, or blogging, or whatever we’re calling it this week. At the time I just called it “updating my Web page.” I’d had a Tripod page before Anhedonia, called am I blue?, but it had been meant as an exercise in Web design and writing that I could perhaps show to potential employers when I was job-hunting earlier that year.

I eventually found the whole online journalling community, decided a lot of it was dumb, scorned it publicly, somehow got sucked back into it enough to help organize JournalCon in Austin, got involved in the local blogging community (to the point of dating one of its organizers), finally decided I didn’t want to deal with any more organizing of anything, particularly journal-related, and here I am.
(I will probably still do Holidailies this year, though. More on that later.)
The original journal page started as random observations about stuff I’d seen or done. It eventually got more personal as I shared details of unrequited attraction and family squabbles and my feelings about my job. After all, I was writing under a pseudonym. Who would figure it out?
(Originally it was meant to be entirely anonymous—I wasn’t going to use a name or location at all—but I had to put something on my email address and for one reason and another, “Jette” ended up being my pseudonym.)
Over the years, coworkers found my journal and I told a few friends about it and eventually I met people through my journal who became friends. I became frustrated about being unable to share as many gory details about my life. My content became safe for coworkers to read. Now it is safe for my family to read, although I haven’t felt compelled to tell them about it yet. My mom would probably complain about the stories I tell about my grandmother, or worse yet, she’d print the stories and read them/mail them to various relatives. My sister would freak out that anything mentioning even the general aspects of her life was on the Web where anyone could see it. My baby brother would (hopefully) think it was way cool and fuss at me for still not having seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High (which is being re-released on DVD next month, at which point I really will have no excuse).
The archives from my older sites—anything before November 2003—are not available online anymore. I keep thinking I will put some of the funnier ones back online, but I haven’t worked out the details.
Celluloid Eyes has morphed into a film blog, with the occasional stories about silly things in my life that I would let anyone read, like the morning where the pickle jar wouldn’t open or a conversation with my dad about his injured finger.
I have access to my site stats now, which I didn’t have six years ago. Anytime I write about my relatives, the numbers skyrocket. Anytime I write a review about an older film, the stats sink. I don’t care. I talked a lot about “writing for myself” when I used to write revealing personal stuff, but the summaries of the movies I see really are for my benefit so I won’t forget about it later. I try to write them so that someone besides myself will understand what I’m trying to say, but the content itself is for my reference.
I can’t do that personal outpouring of details about my life anymore. Sometimes I write like that in a paper notebook that I don’t go back and read. But I can’t bring myself to “share” in that way on the Web. It feels like verbal diarrhea. I don’t want people to know my personal business. Even if I started over on another site with another pseudonym, I don’t think I would be interested in revealing things to a bunch of strangers. Not like that.
You have no idea how difficult it was for me to write the first skin cancer entry, and I came very close to deleting the whole thing, but it ended up being a writer’s challenge to see if I could do it in a way that elicited humor and not unwanted sympathy. It ended up being funny, but too vague—until I had the surgery and wrote about that, people did in fact think I was writing about acne or something trivial.
I think that if I hadn’t switched over to talking about film, this site would probably never be updated. Fortunately, I like writing about movies and I like having a space where I can say whatever the hell I want about any movie I like. If I were a newspaper film critic I’d have to see Taxi and I would not be able to “spoil” the ending and I would probably be accused of using too many big words, or being an elitist, or not writing enough positive reviews. I might spend so much time reviewing Jessica Hilary Lohan movies that I would never get to dig through the films of George A. Romero. Hell, I barely have time now. (Although, honestly, if someone asked me to review movies for a periodical tomorrow I would probably leap in the air and squeak and squeal and bounce and forget to ask about, y’know, getting paid.)
So here’s to six years about writing about whatever the hell I wanted to write about. Once upon a time it was speculation on the appeal of certain intimate acts, now it’s speculation on the appeal of Dawn of the Dead. Who knows what could happen next?
(By the way, do not expect to see an entry reviewing Dawn of the Dead (1978) anytime soon. We made it through 40 minutes of that vomitous mass of a movie before neither of us could stand another second of watching such stupid characters doing idiotic things, and we had to shut it off. Dreadful and pointless. Hard to believe it was directed by the same man who did Night of the Living Dead.)
(Hey, and here’s to six years of writing in which I could include as many digressive remarks in parentheses as I wanted. Hah.)