This is the first blog post of my new website. I’ve been on the internet in some fashion or another for about twenty years now, and I’d hazard that this is probably my tenth website or so. My first website was some slice of HTML I received as part of a computer class in the sixth or seventh grade. I never did much with it besides figure out how to make text gigantic and orange, which is what we customarily did with HTML back in 2002 or so. After that I had a series of Blogspot and Tumblr blogs, none of which lasted more than a week or so. Those all fell out of fashion in the late 2000s what with social media. I never had a MySpace (although hunting around for one is what led my mother to find softcore gay pornography in my search history when I was fourteen) and got a Facebook under duress my senior year of high school. After that it was a decade on Twitter, and then I finally got an Instagram during the first year of the pandemic, when it seemed time to get on the bandwagon everyone else got on years before. (I’ve always been preternaturally early to some things and terribly late to others.)

And now I’m back here, on a website that by all means shouldn’t exist in the year of our lord 2k23, blogging again. What a decidedly ugly word, blogging. It’s one of those words that should only ever be encountered in an online context, free of the shame of having to voice it aloud. Can you imagine Audrey Hepburn saying blogging? It’s decidedly unchic. Yet I am, I must confess, a decidedly unchic person, and so here I am, taking up the mantle of blogging when there’s no reason nor audience to do so.

I barely remember what we used to blog about all those years ago. Not that we can really even find out: the internet has turned out to be such an ephemeral thing. The links have all rotted, the hosting companies folded, and now all we remember from the era are all the bloggers turned blue check journalists crowing on Twitter from their perches on Substack. It’s all quite depressing if you think too hard about it, which I try to do so as little as possible, even though my day job (professor of digital media studies) means that I really should.

But I can hazard a guess: that we blogged about our hopes and our fears, and what we had for dinner, and where we went to travel and who we saw there, and who we fucked and who we hoped to fuck, and what we wanted to tell other people but were too scared to say out loud, and the concerts we went to, and the movies we watched, and our friends who we loved and our friends who we were pissed off at but still loved anyways, and what our cat did in the middle of the night to wake us up, and what it was like to walk down the aisle at our wedding, and what the gym smelled like that day, and what made us nervous, and what made us proud, and a thousand other things besides, because these places were our own and no one else’s.

Anyway. I guess that’s why I wanted to start this blog: to have a place that’s mine and no one else’s. I hope you enjoy it too. I’m going to go make dinner (frittata) now.