Today I consolidated three blogs spanning the years of 2001 to 2007. This was not an easy task since these entries spanned three different companies. Some of the work I had already done years ago apparently. I had moved some entries from LiveJournal to Blogger, then to WordPress, then given up on WordPress and continued on Blogger, but somehow I managed to leave out several LiveJournal entries from the start. After lots of research and importing errors I'm glad to say I got it.
But for all my hard work tonight I still feel a little let down. You see, if you go back to the first entry on this site from 2001, you'll see that it's not the first time I started up a journal. I remember deleting many old entries from my senior year of high school due to girl troubles. There is also an obvious gap between 2007 to last week. During this gap, I worked on two handwritten journals. One of them bridges the gap from 2007-2008. It's entitled The Baby Chronicles and its contents cover most of my wife's pregnancy with our first baby. I'm sorry to say that after she was born there is nothing between June 2008 to June of 2011. Almost exactly three years are missing. No entries anywhere, online or otherwise. Nothing from raising my first baby, the only girl in the family in 30 years, nothing from my engagement except for a video I took setting up the proposal, and nothing from the first eight months of marriage. So much has happened that I just can't explain everything and probably never will be able to. I wonder, if I had journaled at some point in those years, what would I have said? In the flux of emotions that someone goes through during a huge turning point in their lives it would have been great to read my day to day thoughts. I remember most of them now but in twenty years I won't.
A warning to those who might be tempted to go digging around in my past: buried in some of the entries you'll find hookups, breakups, rock bands, drinking and everything else you'd expect from an 18 to 24 year old boy. I don't apologize for anything that I said in here during those years. A journal is a place to send my thoughts and emotions so that I don't have to keep them in. I know there are a few people who might read these and be offended. Well, it was ment to be offensive at the time. Whatever happened back then happened and I moved on. Some of these aren't thought out very well and some are just a few sentences ment to curse someone out. I haven't even read all of these entires so I may be shocked to let a few secrets out of which maybe I don't remember. But so be it. I'm 28 years old now, a father of nearly two and I'm done hiding whatever it is that might still be hidden.
I guess one reason I'm posting this now is because if I'm not here tomorrow, maybe my family and friends will read this and know more about who I really was. Maybe the new people who read it will understand who I really am. Maybe you'll all just think I'm weird, selfish, immature, or vain, but you don't have to read this either. I'm going to close this off tonight with a promise. A promise to never let another year go by where I haven't somewhere, at sometime, written or typed a journal entry. Here's hoping.
