What if I told you I was in love with this?
Welcome back. It’s been a little while, hasn’t it? Let me get you up to speed.
First and most obviously of all, this place looks a bit different. I’ve been putting off the task of redoing my blog design for years, but a switch of webhosts a few months back involved the reinstallation of my old blogging software (Greymatter), support for which had been discontinued before I ever started using it in 2002. A band, The Anniversary, has a song lyric around which I formed the crux of my former design: “Painting without colors / Tends to make it better / It bleaches out the world.” And that nicely summarizes my mental disposition four years ago, when I first started journaling (both here and on paper). If you have a glance at some of the earliest entries of this blog (which have been successfully imported into my new blog software, Wordpress), you will notice some running themes: verbosity, angst, and self-doubt. I was a depressed little camper four years ago, and I needed to talk about it — and I needed a blog that would visually convey my feelings. I wanted to cast the world in a hueless light so I could better focus on my own colors. So, with a few pointed exceptions meant to draw the eye, the last design was entirely black, white, and shades of grey.
As time went on, I climbed out of that quagmire of depression (the reasons for which you could glean from the topics of the early posts, if you are inclined to such curiosity), but the look of the blog remained. It started to hold me down; with every passing month, the person I was and the person I had been were walking down ever-divergent paths — but still, the look of the blog remained. I post here less and less frequently because it reminds me of that person — and while I’m neither ashamed of that person nor the things through which he went, I’m ready to be the person I’ve become.
So I’ve livened up the joint. I’m not saying I’m as happy as this new look would suggest; but then again, I was never as unhappy as the previous design’s swirls of grey implied, although perhaps I wanted to be. It was a pain, getting everything on the backend of this blog installed, converted, and cleaned up (I finally deleted all of those crappy spam comments — there were over 1000!), and it would have been very easy to archive the whole lot and start anew. But I have a nostalgic streak; I have a soft spot for the past, and I felt it was important to not try and repress any of that. Repression, after all, used to be chief amongst my faults.
San Francisco. I moved here about three and a half months ago, and I can’t fully describe in words everything that’s been going on with and within me — though in time, obviously, I will try. I want to relegate the point of this post to being the “state of the union” that you just read, so I will refrain from describing the specifics of the last fourteen weeks… But I’ll be back for more, soon.
Thanks for reading this. It means a lot to me, that you would check in and read about what I’m going through, even given my three month absence. I have been writing, by the way. As I mentioned, I started journaling and blogging at the same time, and right now, I’m starting my sixth journal (given to me by Aaron; Chelsea gave me the fifth). It’s full of thoughts, worries, hopes, and yes — song lyrics. But that’s a post for another time.
Can someone name the next line in the song after which this blog is named? It’s all I can think about, right now.
