The Long View, or, Jessi's Blogs Through the Years

I've been casually blogging for years. I started my first blog on LiveJournal - or maybe it was Xanga? - in like, 2003 or 2004. I blogged primarily about whatever life-ending crisis was happening in my 15-year-old existence during that week, usually in opaque and vague (I thought) terms. At some point, if I wasn't already on Xanga, I closed my LiveJournal and migrated there. I think I stayed there for a couple years, continuing to blog about nonsense.

In 2008, I started a blog about my semester in London. That blog is still up somewhere out there, but I can't remember the URL, and I think I set it as unsearchable so no search engine can help me find it. When I came back from London and settled into serious studying for the LSAT, I started another blog, this time on WordPress. It is still up, and you can find it here. Glancing back through it, it looks like I talked once about shampoo and once about marriage (tangentially), and the rest of the time I talked about law school. It is amazing to see how neurotic I was. Interestingly, I said this in February 2011:

"I couldn’t tell you what I would do if I didn’t go to law school in August. My guess? Be employed and happy and have a vague plan to eventually go back to school to get a degree that I’d have a targeted use for."

Remarkably, that is exactly what I'm doing. Apparently the neuroses have paid off.

In 2011, I began a blog that was intended to focus on my quarter-life crisis. Right after I started the blog, I got a new job, moved to a new city, and more or less figured out my life, so the crisis ended. That blog never went anywhere. Early this year, I transitioned it to a "Watch Jessi Online Date" blog, but after a week on an online dating site where I answered the messages of one person and then deactivated my account, that attempt at consistent blogging also failed. (It may have failed in part because I couldn't think up a new name for it after the transition to the online dating project. As my friend Alexis pointed out, continuing to call it "The Ball Pit" when I would be writing solely about dating men was in rather poor taste.)

So here I am, blogging for the first time under my real name. I don't expect to discover that I have a remarkable ability to say anything interesting or to say it well, but I do need a project, and I spend so much time at the computer anyway that I may as well try to create something while I'm at it.

And taking the long view, I'll be able to reference this blog in a few years when I've migrated somewhere new and write another retrospective of my stop-and-go blogging history.