Yesterday was this journal's fifth anniversary. Strangely, particularly given my susceptibility to the documentary impulse, I did not muster the energy to commemorate the occasion. It occurred to me, but I had other priorities. That said, I did renew my paid membership for another year. And I've been following the entries of my friends with my usual care, even if I've been commenting with less frequency elsewhere and replying to comments with less speed and meticulousness here. In case you're keeping score, I'm trailing 12,610 to 10,324, a gap that I have little hope of ever closing significantly.

Now that I'm writing this, I remembered that I've always felt strange celebrating my anniversary on August 31st, since my first entry with meaningful content was posted on September 1st:

We were on vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains, our last family trip before I was to go to Germany as an exchange student. The night of the draft, I watched the sports news in our motel room and was happy for Len. The next morning, we walked across a dewy field to get breakfast and I let visions of Bias in a Celtics uniform flit through my brain. And then we went inside. There were newspapers on display with the news. And I was just so stunned. It was really hard to take, what with my post-graduation euphoria and visions of the future suddenly darkened by needless death.

I like to think that my prose has changed considerably as a result of writing so much and so regularly in these parts. But the evidence belies that conviction.

Still, I know that I've become much more adept at sizing up the complexities of audience response since I began this journal. And that was, after all, the main reason I wanted to start blogging in the first place. The irony is that, for all the nuances I'm able to discern in my limited but still remarkably varied readership, both within the context of Live Journal and outside of it, I'm still not able to communicate the messages that matter most with much clarity. Part of that is because of my readership, whose composition has made it impossible for me to write as freely as I would like or, indeed, as I once did here. There are other reasons, though, including my reluctance to commit to a position that forecloses the possibility of maintaining good relations with those who do not share it. As I've suggested recently, that position on taking positions has proven increasingly untenable over the last few years and is one of the first things I want to overhaul in the course of the self-refashioning I'm presently undertaking.

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday
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