An Anniversary, Ms. Havisham Style

[cbertsch]

Well, this journal has made it to another year. This is my sixth anniversary here. But it's also the most bittersweet, since many of the friends I looked forward to reading have abandoned the site and others only post infrequently. As a measure of how things have changed, I almost went back and changed that "here" in the second sentence to "there," since most of the comments I get these days come indirectly, via the "notes" I import from Live Journal into Facebook. Sigh. It depresses me, because there are many things about LJ that I still dig, despite its many problems, from the ease with which concentric circles of friendship -- intimate to casual -- can be managed to the comment threading that still makes Facebook's implementation seem ridiculously lame. And I say all that despite a pretty strong hunch that my life would have gone a lot better if I'd never taken the plunge into personal blogging. Anyway, here's the tally, for what it's worth: 3267 journal entries, 13,849 comments received and 11,350 comments posted. I wonder if I'll make it to 4000?

Comments

[pissang.livejournal.com]

I still read you every day. My LJ is kind of like Charliejournal b/c I never cultivated a large network of "friends" and the ones I do have don't write much anymore. Even though I don't comment much, I prefer reading you here than on Facebook due to the friendlier interface.

I am just going to assume I'm one of those people who you are upset about not posting anymore. If not, I should be. I actually still write a bit, but I find myself making my posts private when I'm done. I don't know why but my urge to share has dried up. Possibly, if I grew my readership, I'd have a greater desire to post. And possibly I outgrew the persona I began writing with and never bothered to develop a new one. Anyway, you're blog is still up there with espn.com as one of my favorite forms of productive procrastination.

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

Ha! Well, that's nice to hear.

Actually, you aren't one of the people I had in mind, because your posts were always intermittent. I'm always delighted to see one, but never expected you to be regular.

I suppose it was the disintegration of my Tucson LJ friend/acquaintance network that bothered me most. People I had regular contact with online and offline have now ceased to show up here. And I feel like I can't really contact them offline, strange as that may sound, because I no longer see them online. Funny how that works.