Going through old posts is getting harder. I’m halfway through 2006, and the decent pieces of writing are becoming more sparse. I’m having to resist the urge to throw down “bullshit” and “pseudo-intellectualism” tags left and right. Even more tempting is the desire to censor the stuff that really makes me groan. In a few cases I have changed things that I realize, now, are not ideal to have sitting on a blog, but so far I’ve refrained from eliminating stuff just because it’s embarrassing. If I were to start doing that, I might as well just start over on another blog.
Tagging has proved to be a challenge in and of itself. Finding a consistent schema for labeling posts is no small task when faced with such a large volume of material. Variety of topic isn’t the problem, but the different style of presenting and discussing content. The further back I go, the more willing I am to post incomplete work because my thought process didn’t take me any further. These days, I seem to be very firmly planted in an essay or chapter format, where a given post is focused on one concept and meant to stand completely on its own. This was not always so. I’m noticing that I often kept multiple lines of discussion going at the same time, exploring each in their own paragraph or two, sometimes trying to create a common thread between them and other times not. It gets hard to categorize a post that broaches a dozen or more of the tags I’ve been using.
Still, I’m excited to have some organizational structure going on. Each category is becoming its own story of how my personality and values have changed over time, along with fairly regular tidbits about major news events or cultural blips going on at the time. It’s greatly satisfying to see that I’ve developed answers for many of the vexing questions I frequently pondered, and to remember how many of the absurd worries I had back then are no longer relevant to my life at all. Being able to see that gives me renewed interest in keeping it strong. If the data is already getting rich at 9 years, I can’t wait to see what it will be like at 20 and 30. Will children of the future read the blogs their parents wrote at their age? I suppose it’s a bit narcissistic to desperately hope my progeny will read all of this with great interest, but that seems like a potentially phenomenal victory for the digital age. Completely lossless transmission of massive information across generations.