A 5 year affair

So yesterday I happen to realize that I've been blogging since May 2006, which makes this year a 5th anniversary of sort. I started a blog because I wanted a place to just put out what was in my head that I couldn't talk about with friends at the time. This basically had a lot to do with being in my very first relationship, and a complicated one at that. 

I was browsing back to the early days on Dilly-dallying and it kind of makes me blush. The first post, is  not anything original, thank heavens! It's a quote from Adrienne Rich and quite a 'typical me' one at that. From then on though there's a cheesy-poetry-to-my-boyfriend phase I've gone through where I've produced some pure gems of mush. Like this for instance. Or this. Goodlord, WHAT ON EARTH! I am sorry to have subjected the world to that. But I'd like to think, towards the latter stage of things, going by the reception of some of you, that the poetry did improve. Maybe it was once I stopped trying to be a poet and just wrote in the moment. A lot of what I wrote on that blog as far as poetry went really was in the heat of the moment. I'd just open a new post and type it in, then and there. Rarely, if ever, have I gone back and edited them. So in a way, my early adult years are all there in those posts. From being in love to being out of love, going through the motions of  some pretty tough times in my life,  to talking about war and peace; I'm all there. I have put myself out there to a web of strangers, some now turned friends. But we'll get to you guys later.

As my interests and my sense of self has evolved so has my blogging. This blog, as some of you know started as a way for me to be a bit more open with my life and interest, in a journal style straightforward way than I did with the poetry on Dilly-dallying. It was also a response to some of my friends who'd read the poetry on Dilly-dallying who told me that it seemed like I was a massively depressed dark person. :D So April's Fool was also my way of showing that there's more sides to me and I wasn't necessarily crying myself to sleep every night or popping pills. 

I never have cared for popularity and making the charts on Kottu or anywhere. I used to blog mostly to myself. I'd rarely interact on the comment sections. Blogging at the start was a one-way affair for me. I send. You receive. End of conversation. But that changed with time. I have now come to be more and more acknowledging of an audience, whether it be one or one hundred (no I'm yet to acquire that number). Dilly-dallying, as it stands now is kind of unrecognizable from it's early days and this for me is a good thing; because I am unrecongizable now compared to the young woman that started that blog back in 2006. At the core I am the same, but I have grown up, come out of my own head, and so has Dilly-dallying.  It is currently a litteray blog because I want it to now NOT be about me. I want to use it as a platform to have conversations about books and writing; over the years I'm sure it will evolve into whatever it is on its way to being.

I can't say what direction this blog itself is going. You might notice that it is a bit under the radar: it's not on Kottu, I don't always announce new posts on Twitter like I do with the other one nor do I even have it listed under my blogger profile. I can't precisely say why I did that but I did want this to be less "out there" so to speak. I have debated making this blog private but I've come to understand the content doesn't necessarily at this stage warrant that. I am a lot more mature about where and how I air my feelings on the web and I think the purpose of Web 2.0 for me has changed from personal-cleansing to sharing (enter all my Tumblrs!). It's now more just me documenting (within boundaries) and sharing my life and interests with a bunch of people I feel like are my friends. I've recently even gotten rid of my earlier pseudonym and go by my nickname that most of my friends refer to me with.

Friends. It's a strange thing but I do feel like even though I haven't met some of you, that I can call you guys friends. Being on Twitter makes this all the more the case. So when I sit back and write these posts I am writing as though I'm writing an e-mail to a friend. I really am. I've had the fortune of meeting some of you, I've been to school but lost touch along the way with some of you, I'm just Twitter/Facebook friends with some of you, but whatever our degree of friendship, I am thankful to have gotten to know you. Blogging has led the way to not only finding myself a little bit more, but also finding new friends. And that I think is what makes 5 years of blogging pretty damn worth it. 

Someone asked for cake right?! ;D