aintbroke | (no subject)

Folks:
Today is my ten year lj-versary.

isilya just mentioned that she's been around these parts for more than a decade, and I checked my calendar- only to realize that I too have been hanging out here for ten years.

Ten years ago, at this time, I was psuedo-interning for Noam Chompski, harassing people of varying importance at the Pentagon, testing out search engines to see what dogpile/google/yahoo considered the best results, learning how to hard code html, getting my heart broken by college admissions boards, and generally not being a whole lot younger than I feel today.

I sort of understand intellectually that it's been a long time. And when I add up the things I have done since then, I guess it has been a while. But I remember riding my bike to the IRC, sitting in that squeaky chair in the only room without a window, and compiling lists of bizarrely specific data- like it was yesterday. (Maybe even better than yesterday, because I can still cite you statistics on what percentage of GDP goes to weapons acquisition in ten countries, but I can not tell you what the 4th line treatments for hypertension are.)

Ten years! I know many people are migrating away to other social networks- and it's true that I spend more time on tumblr than I do here- but I love this space we've built, and I love you all for sharing it with me. Thanks for the good times, folks. Thanks for teaching me, and telling me.Thanks for growing up along with me.

Here's to ten more years of whatever's coming next.

(In this post, the banana represents time, and the old woman represents me, shocked and astonished that time is catching up to me. You'll never take me without a fight, banana!)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ten years ago at this time, I was planning my wedding and, um, a huge move across the country from Boston to Albuquerque. No shit. I didn't sign on to LJ until the following April, so it's still approximately 9 years for me.

I'm still here and still reading. I've moved my LJ-style posting to Google+ plus because with migration away from LJ, I was left with about three regular readers, and after a while I felt like I was the tree falling in the woods that nobody heard. The majority of my LJ social community has, for whatever reason, washed up on G+.

I don't know anything about the phase of your life that happened 10 years ago, and I would love to know more.

Yeah, I hear you on the migration. I ended up on LJ by default- because for a really long time everyone I wanted to keep in touch with was here! And then I had a few people who were only on facebook, and then half my friends page migrated to elsewhere, and now it seems like everyone is on twitter (TWITTER I ASK YOU) and/or Dreamwidth and/or tumblr and/or private blogs and/or offline, and LJ is a ghost town. But I do not like any of the other social medias as much, and so I am stubbornly here. As much as I have ever been, which is like, quarterly.

My biggest beef with G+ is the difficulty of merging my two google identities. I have my default not-associated-with-my-whole-name email, and my firstnamelastname email, and I would really like google to understand that those are the same person, and if someone invites me to edit a doc in one, the other should also be able to edit, or read G+ posts or something. I can send email from both identities from the same screen! But somehow all other integrated googlings require me to sign out and sign back in. Or, conversely, I want a way to be able to follow locked LJ post and friends only G+ thru RSS. All I want, Echo, is the entire world to conform to my convenience. That doesn't really seem like much to ask, frankly.

Ten years ago I was a high school senior equivalent!
I played Anne Frank in a traveling show (I have nothing pithy to say about that, except that I still don't actually like Anne much as a person),
Got my heart broken by college admissions boards (why would you admit me and give me inadequate financial aid? extra cruel!),
Slammed into the world of "Dyslexia is a learning disability," (true story: not actually an issue until university chemistry which made me cry a lot)
Had my first boooooyfriend (who is and was a delightful person)
And interned at a political think tank (True story: I wandered in because I liked their sign and had no idea what they did. I volunteered for them for a few years, and then they offered me a paid internship, where I internet-gofur'd for Noam Chompski and other luminaries of political thought.)
In as much as I have always been a stoic who didn't like feelings- it was a big year, full of big feelings.