ten years

Today marks ten years and 2500+ posts of blogging here. Can you believe it? I still kind of can't. The other night I spent lots of time reading old blog posts and looking through old pictures from the past ten years, and the only deep thing I concluded is that lots of unimportant things have changed, but some really important things have stayed the same. The picture above, for example, is of me and my childhood BFF Tim, almost exactly ten years ago at his 17th birthday party. Unimportant things that have changed: I don't flip my hair out with a small barrel curling iron, have braces, or have way-too-thin eyebrows anymore, and Tim (hopefully) doesn't wear red ties and black dress shirts anymore. Important thing that hasn't changed: Tim and I, through the miracle of the internet and social networking, are still friends and keep in touch—something I would not have thought would be the case when I left for college almost ten years ago. Thank you, blogging!

All of my early blog posts are littered with LOLs and complaints about boys, but they are kind of hilarious and I miss hilarious 16 year-old me. I posted 3-4 times a day sometimes! And I always had something ridiculous yet insightful to say—usually commentary about daytime TV, Ben Affleck, or John Mayer. And then we get to college, where my blogging tapered off due to time spent doing homework/thinking about doing homework but not actually doing it, or thinking about boys I had a crush on. Then midway through there I met Robbie—my blogging definitely took a nosedive there, which makes me a little bit sad, because I really would love to hear what I had to say about Robbie at the time. And now? I spend more time reading other people's blogs than writing on my own, and when I do post anything, it's pictures of stuff. Wah wah.

The most important thing to me about blogging now is that I'm able to keep in touch with people, and that I'm able to meet new people from all over the place. It's a little bit insane how big the blogging world is, yet it is kind of teeny-tiny because of the connections people feel comfortable making. This is how I like to live my life in the real world, so I'm glad that blogging has turned into a community and a "thing" that people do.

Here are some of my favorite posts from the archives from each year of blogging. Some funny, some serious—all awkward and about boys. Bear with me while I pull these skeletons out of the closet.

• On sixteen year-old me (what the heck was up with my taste in music?)
• On breaking up with your first boyfriend (bonus from 2003 for fellow MHS-ers: when my German teacher called me to ask me to explain the plot of "Alias" to her)
• On celebrities, and movies that are "sensitive and true" (I just laugh that I appear to have such a tenuous relationship with my mom in some of these posts. Being a teenager is tough.)
• On weird roommates
• On being vague when a boy breaks your heart
• On being vague when you fall in like with a boy (I wrote this post right before Robbie and I had our first kiss/went on our second date [in that order]) (side note: 2007 was actually a GREAT year for blogging and life in general—deserves its own retrospective.)
• On being still (good reminder)
• On Paris
• On writing notes to my younger self
• On accomplishments, love, and loss 

Thanks for keeping up with me over the years. I'm looking forward to the next ten.