June 25, 2004
2 authors, 3 years, 800+ posts
I don't like to mark the passage of time. Ask Dave—who tallies up the weeks since our last vacation, the hours until Trevor's birthday, the days since we've been to the movies—ask him if he thinks I know what wedding anniversary we're celebrating this year and he'll give you one of his derisive laughs and say, "She probably doesn't even know that today is nine years to the day from the first time we ever went to a Chili's together." Go figure.
But I do keep up enough to know that June marks our third full year of writing at Liloia.com. Sure, we've had random online homes in the past, like Dave's gardening site on GeoCities and my weekly column at Suite101. Those sites lost their luster after (at most) a year and are now abandoned Web debris. But once we settled here, something clicked and we suddenly found ourselves among friends who posted their opinions on Palahniuk books, Christopher Guest films, reality television, raising kids, Massachusetts drivers, technology wars and gargantuan lobsters. We felt at home.
Someone asked me at last year's BloggerCon why we blog. "Why post this stuff publicly? Who reads it?" were the questions. I had a little rehearsed explanation about keeping my family updated, something that was echoed at BloggerCon 2004 by another well-known blogger. But as the years passed, family readership became less of a factor. We were drawn into a diverse blogging community, connected only by words on a screen.
It's a connection that's reinforced when, say, Wil Wheaton links to your post or when a reality television personality writes an angry letter protesting your complaints about their show. When someone an ocean away recommends a song that fits your taste perfectly or when a friend nine states away sends you a piece of custom artwork. You feel utterly connected to your world when not only can you speak to it, but it speaks back.
I'm still amazed to arrive at events organized via comment threads and trackbacks and find actual people waiting. I still get butterflies when showing up to someone's house after an email invitation -- what if the Internet is one colossal joke and there's no one waiting? But there is always someone waiting and it has always been a kind someone with a wide, welcoming smile. We're strangers, but not entirely. Brunches, lunches, dinners, meetups, movies, book clubs, job offers -- the Internet is not the great isolating space that we were warned about.
Thanks for being part of our online community. Here's to 800 more posts about what we had for breakfast. And cats.