Five Years.

by Alexa on July 19, 2010

I have been doing this, whatever it is, for five years today. Five years! It astounds me. Five years ago, when I told people that I wrote about my personal life on the Internet, they looked at me as if I’d just said I spent my free time masturbating in public parks. “Why?” they’d ask, disgusted, “Why would you want to do such a thing?” Now they just nod, like: Of course you do. Now they ask me how much money (which I just typed as “munny,” a sure sign that I should be asleep) I make doing it, this writing online, this blogging, and when I tell them I don’t make much of anything they revert back to their suspicious “Why?”-ing of yesteryear.

There have been so many unlikely and strange developments in this exchange over the past half-decade that I am not sure where to begin discussing it—with the fact that blogging is a THING now, that people no longer uniformly regard as a sort of electronic literary streak across the quad (though it may be that, sometimes)? With the fact that blogging is viewed as a moneymaking enterprise? With the fact that, to the general public, the acceptableness of blogging is seemingly in direct proportion to this aforementioned compensatory aspect? Or with the way the intersection of opportunity and something else has conspired to make the idea of a hobby seem quaint and obsolete?

I think about that last one a lot. With Etsy and Websites and Paypal oh my, an unprecendented number of people are being paid for their knitting or painting or whittling or whatever it is they used to do for sport. This is undoubtedly a wonderful development, a development that allows me to buy all manner of covetable handmade items without leaving my home, but it has also created a sense that one should be selling and publicizing and, I’ll say it, MONETIZING (it sounds like spinning straw into gold! Possibly very apropos!) one’s every avocation. It’s an odd world for the lazy and dilettantish among us, I must admit.

But back to the point: five years. Sixty months. Where has the time gone? What have I done with it?

Children conceived: 3
Live babies acquired: 1
Men married: 1
Apartments lived in: 4
Books written: 1
Degrees acquired: 0
Unfamiliar countries visited: 1
Unfamiliar states visited: 1
Couches owned: 3
Pets felled by disease/neglect: 0
Days admitted to hospital: 16
Literary rejections received: 3(?)
Pounds gained: 20
Kidney stones passed: 2
Correspondence unanswered, television hours consumed, friends made, perspective granted, and storms weathered: all too great to measure with current technology.

Your turn.

Five Years.

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