So yes, for those who don't already know, I recently started updating this journal again, after a hiatus of almost nine months (see the previous update for the reasons why, and why it was dormant for so long in the first place); and as promised last time, I'm going to make an effort this year to get a new update written every weekend if possible, and to get back in the habit of keep this thing up to date regularly, even if perhaps it will never be as risque again as it was when I first started it. In fact, to be frank, ever since first joining Facebook about 15 months ago now, postings at all my other online destinations have dropped to nearly nothing, because of being able to do almost all of it over at Facebook alone: it's where, for example, I now post most of my inane random thoughts about stupid shit like pop culture, which are then immediately sent to the 500 or so people in my worldwide network of friends, acquaintances and fans who are most likely to read them in the first place, and with a chance for them to slap on a smartass comment right that second, but being forced to include their real name, which keeps troll-like behavior to a minimum, the whole thing designed in a way so that it only takes up as much of their time as they purposely choose to devote to it. It's the perfect system! The one I've been whining for years that I wish someone would invent for me! They finally did! And now it has 600 gajillion users! What a surprise!

But with as good a system as it is, Facebook is still lousy at letting people share blog-like extended thoughts with others, even ones as sparse as a single long paragraph or two, and I've come to realize recently that one of the reasons I wanted to get this personal journal of mine active again is so I could start sharing some of these thoughts again, in a format and venue that's more appropriate. So for example, this week we finally had our first warm day of the year here in Chicago; and so that inspired me to go out that evening to Holiday Club Uptown in my neighborhood for a pint of Guinness and a little people-watching, on what naturally was the first warm night of the year. And as expected, it was the same idea that everyone else in the neighborhood had, which had the place packed on a Thursday night, and with everyone in t-shirts and in a good mood, and with all the windows open and this lovely breeze wafting across it all, just a really nice night to be an urban dweller out among humanity, having a drink and doing a little writing and checking out all the cute girls, with my short new spring haircut and my little hipster plastic-framed glasses.

And while I was there, I couldn't help thinking about how just six months ago, I was literally dying for an opportunity to do a little nothing activity like this, of how desperately I was wishing back last September and October that I could simply pack up on a warm evening, walk down the street to a hipster hangout space like a pub or cafe, and enjoy a few hours in the company of attractive, like-minded people my age. Because that of course was when I was still on crutches, staying at my parents' place, barred by my doctor from stepping one foot beyond their front porch, not even down the sloped driveway to check the mail; and then even after I gained the ability to go out, I still had to get "permission" to do so (that is, mooch a car ride, which is tantamount to having to ask another person for permission to move freely), work out elaborate details on when to go and when to come back and where to be dropped off and where to get picked up, worry about other people's schedules even when they weren't with me, be denied the opportunity to ever make last-minute changes or play situations by ear, etc.

Say what you will about breaking a hip, but at least it taught me some good things as well; like, don't take simple pleasures for granted, and learn to better appreciate such inconsequential events as walking down the street on a warm night for a pint of beer at your neighborhood pub. I was thinking of all this again the other night at Holiday, thinking about how many points there were last fall when I so desperately wished I could be doing exactly what I was now doing; and that of course left me both sad and happy at the same time, and with a strong sense of melancholy to the whole thing. That's simply a fact that can't be changed, that I will always now think back on 2009 with a strong sense of sadness and melancholy, not just because of the accident but from going through the worst of my dental work the first six months of that year, and that also being the year I was forced to work through the complicated emotions of having two different friends commit suicide. And that's a hard thing to fully express in a mere few hundred characters over at Facebook, which like I said is part of why I wanted to get this journal back into active status again, so I can occasionally take a deep breath and expend the space necessary to get across a complicated experience like that.

Oh, but now that I think about it, there is a major piece of news to share as well; for the first time in its eleven-year history, all 700 or so entries of this personal journal can now be found here at the main website within a single organizational system, when for years all the older entries could only be found at my old Geocities site, which is where my website first started out back in the mid-'90s, back when there was no such thing as "content management systems" and one had to hand-code every single page found at their site. (That's a fascinating subject I should devote a whole entry here to soon, in fact -- how when we talk about the idea of "blogs" revolutionizing society in the early 2000s, what we're really talking about is how automated content management systems like Wordpress and TypePad changed everything.) So why finally finish the conversion, after a decade of broken promises? Because Yahoo closed Geocities! Goddamn! I didn't think anything ever truly closed on the internet! But indeed it did in this case, which finally forced me to re-enter all those old entries into my Movable Type system here, which not by coincidence I mostly did back at my parents' place last autumn while I was recovering from my bicycle accident, and had literally nothing else to do for 16 hours a day than read books, watch TV, and kill time online.

I still haven't categorized them all, which makes random browsing through the archives still fairly difficult, unless you're doing it by date alone; but hopefully that'll be my long-term project for this coming autumn, so that eventually my "Repository of Life Experiences" here will actually be as useful as its snarky name has promised all this time. (And who knows, maybe I'll finally change the design scheme this autumn too -- it's been three years since the last overhaul, after all.) To tell you the truth, I thought I was going to get an entire new journal entry out of the process, imagining myself reading through all those old entries again with a bit of cringing but fond laughter, reliving my old glory days as a twenty-something poetry-scene trainwreck; but I found myself mostly just wincing whenever trying to read the old entries last fall when re-entering them, which made me realize that reading them while recovering from hip surgery just probably wasn't a good idea. So another time, I'm sure, and hopefully by this time in 2011 the whole thing will be done, and it will finally be time to take on the next giant overwhelming challenge here -- of cleaning up the 500 or so decent photos I took back in college, getting those added to the Repository, and also putting out some downloadable eBooks of the collections too. Sheesh, talk about a year-long labor-intensive process I'm not looking forward to.

And is there anything else? Oh, well, there's always something else; but since I'm dedicated to getting weekly updates posted here again, I suppose everything else can wait for a future entry. I'll just end then by pointing out that I finally got the sidebar information here at the site updated for the first time in eight months as well, which will hopefully make things a little easier to navigate. And that's it for this week! See you later!