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

[cbertsch.livejournal.com]

I sometimes have these grandiose ideas about what I'm doing, what I've been doing all along. And since I had them pretty much from the beginning, or even before I started, I suppose they would count as the product of authorial intention. But having to sustain that kind of project while also presenting glimpses of one's actual existence is difficult. I am reminded of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, which is both entirely fictional and kind of like an autobiography.