It's an anniversary! Tenth year of blogging here

It's the blog's ninth anniversary, which means this year will be the tenth year of blogging here. How have we gone? If you asked me when I started what I imagined the blog would become I would not have been able to give you the merest inkling. I just had an urge to write. It was the first year of my media degree (school starts usually in early March). There was this thing called "blogging" which more and more people were doing. Frankly, that's about it. I was happy. I had some free time. I was living alone again (Virginia Woolf's "room of one's own"). The time was ripe.

In that time I have made some friends through the blog who have continued to stay in touch. I am grateful to them because they represent something enduring about the human spirit. Making lasting relationships seems to be a particularly human thing to do, and it is an important one I have found in my terrestrial travels.

When I look back at the first post I am if nothing else EMBARRASSED by its know-nothingness, its simplicity, and the lack of direction that drove it and the posts that followed in the weeks ahead. Book reviews have become an integral part of this blog (I haven't been reading since July, mostly, which is why they've been absent of late), as have movie reviews. Those started in January 2006 and helped to set the primarily serious tone of the blog. If nothing else the blog has been highly personal. It has purveyed material and ideas that I care about. It has gone some way toward representing me in the online world (I won't say "cyberspace" for fear of upsetting some people; you know who you are).

The focus on the personal and the generally aimless nature of the blog are things that I find attractive, as is the mainly serious nature of what I post. These qualities can serve as well as anything to go some way to define me online. I don't mind. I am in the main happy with how the blog has turned out. It has a protean, shape-shifting nature that pleases me because it means that I can accommodate many different types of things on it without breaking any pattern or mold. It is chameleonic, mercurial and a little bit undeterminate in its goals. Which is fine by me.

I don't see these characteristics changing as we venture down the track of time into the tenth year of blogging here. I see more of the same, more reviews of books that happen to draw me in, more discussions about my feelings about certain things, and possibly even a return to the political vociferations I used to do when I was in a healthier state of mind. We'll see. Time will tell.