Much to my astonishment, when I added up the hours I'd worked this week, along with the extra hour I have from last week, I'm only short by four hours. So I'm trying to decide what to do about it. If I work ten hours today and tomorrow, then I won't have to make any up. Or I could work nine-and-a-half hour days and make up the last hour from my leave. Or I could just work nine hour days and either make up the two hours from my leave or actually make them up later. Lots of options. I think what I'll do is walk over to the main suite today and ask to see how awful the paperwork is for making up the hours later - see whether it's worth a little bit of leave.
In case you didn't notice, there's a new line at the top: Today marks this journal's first birthday! For one year today, I've been sharing the details of my life! Happy Birthday, Reflections!
Okay, that's enough exclamation marks for now. The "Last year" link won't be there every day, of course - I didn't start writing on a regular basis until sometime in March, and even then I've missed weekends and occasional weekdays. But if there's an entry to show, then I'll show it.
Something interesting about that first entry - Reflections trivia, if you will - I actually wrote it on the 26th of January. If you look at the URL of the link (most browsers show it in the status bar) you'll see the date on it is 19990126. But I didn't post it until the 27th, and so that's the date in the entry, and that's why the journal's birthday is today and not yesterday. I guess you could say it was a long labor.
I must say, I'm a little astonished that I made it this far. I've never been able to keep a paper journal for very long. I've got one at home, and I write in it maybe twice a year, usually when I'm feeling depressed and full of angst. The entries there are full of melodrama and are embarassing to read even a few days later.
So why have I been able to keep an online journal so much better? The simplest answers are that I'm a geek, so a geek journal draws me more; or that I've made my daily writing part of my routine, so my writing every morning is habitual, sortof like brushing my teeth. But the real answer is that I have an audience here. According to my logs, about twelve people a day read this journal. Some of them are random hits, of course, and at least one of them is me, checking to make sure everything uploaded all right. There are some friends who check only once a week, though, so my current guess is that I've got about ten regular readers. At least two of them are people I've never met in the flesh, and I find that somewhat surprising; I thought I would only attract "real-life" friends who were curious to know what was happening in my life and fascinated to occasionally see their names in print.
I'm not really a hit-hound. I write because I want to and need to, and it's enough for me to know that I have an audience even if the audience is - as it was at the beginning - no more than the few who were closest to me in real life. I've debated many times taking down the sitelogs altogether and only learning of my readers when they felt compelled to write to me. I didn't re-establish my Open Pages link when I moved my site, and I'm still trying to decide if I'm ever going to.
It's a delicate balance to maintain. Really, I write this journal for myself. I think reading the old entries is fascinating, really. It's fun to read over my speculations, knowing how it turned out. It's interesting to read about events that I've completely forgotten and think, Oh, yeah, I remember that now! or even more peculiar, I did that? I thought that? Wow, how weird. But the reason I keep writing is because I have an audience, and I don't want to disappoint them - you. I like to think that if I stopped writing suddenly, if I skipped more than one or two days without prior warning, I'd get a few e-mails asking what had happened, and I'd be reminded to write again. Just knowing that you're there is enough to make sure I write something every day, even if it's just a brief explanation that there's nothing going on worth writing about.
But then, one of the things I've learned over the past year is that it never happens that there's nothing to write about. I complained about it a lot toward the beginning, that there was nothing exciting happening. As the year goes on, I made that statement less and less. If there wasn't anything I wanted to write about, then I made something up. Talked about my childhood or my past or my family or wrote fiction, even. There's always something to write about. It's an interesting lesson to have learned.
I can't wait to see what the next year teaches me. I hope you'll all be there with me as I learn it. I am deeply and sincerely grateful to every one of you - even those of you I don't know or even know about - for joining me on this journey.
In celebration of Reflection's birthday, would you do me a huge favor? Even if you wound up here by accident or at random, even if today is the first day you've ever read this journal and you never intend to come back, would you please follow this link and answer the question posed? (I promise, no statistics will be collected, no cookies set unless you ask for them, and no junk mail will result.)
Thanks.
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