Happy Birthday To This

With less than a month until my twenty-fifth birthday I am left pondering – am I ready to be an adult yet?

The conclusion would seem to be foregone. I’ve certainly been paying my own way for years now; I have a steady job (actually, a new one, as of Monday). I live in a beautiful house. I’m in a long-term relationship. I own plenty of adultish toys I could never before afford.

In short, I would seem to have attained some sort of stablity. A steady state. Does that make me an adult? How do I measure my adultness? How can i quantify it.

The answer to that quarter-life birthday riddle lies in this day, also a birthday – the birthday of this blog. At this moment I have been blogging continuously under a single title for six years, now entering my seventh.

That has nothing to do with being an adult. But, my blog tells me all sorts of things about the person i used to be, in contrast to who i am now. It tells me about slogging away at a coffee shop for CD money. It tells me about living in dorms rooms and ghetto apartments. It tells me about uncertain crushes and the blossoming of a more permanent romance.

It reminds me of when I only owned one ugly, thick-necked, out-of-tune guitar.

Obviously i’ve seen some progress. And, if you’ve stuck around long enough, you’ve seen it too. You’ve also seen the evolution of my writing – both in what I finding inspiring, and how I get my message across.

This year you’ve seen some new things – two out-of-state, out-of-comfort-zone adventures that I documented via my camera phone. You’ve also been left out of a few details, like my joy in seeing friends and co-workers experience the thrills of marriage and childbirth, my re-emergence at local open mics, and my excitement over my new position at work. I just don’t have the will – or the time – to report it all.

And, the nature of the internet has fundamentally changed. No one wants to wander out a domain blog when they can stay in the safety of LiveJournal or MySpace to read about their friends. And, with that centralization comes the dawning realization that all of this is in fact permanently archived (duh), leaving everyone frantic to carefully cover their electronic trails so future dates or bosses can’t find out every dirty little secret.

Has that changed me? I can’t really say. I’ve always tried to blog what’s important to me, even if only to remember something that might otherwise drift out of my memory. So, while other blogs are created and deleted, while other bloggers become LJ-checkers and MySpace addicts, me and this digital mirror still remain.

I wish I had time every day to devote to this. I wish i had tricked out special features and new songs for you every day. But, i wish that every year. No matter what i wish for, what i already have is what this means to me, and what you mean to me for still caring about it. And, if you need to go away for a while – to your MySpace or your real life – that’s okay. I’ll still be here, still growing. If it weren’t for this, i might not realize just how adult i’ve become; if i don’t keep it up, how will i ever know how far i have left to go?

Thank you for watching (and sometimes listening) as i’ve inevitably and inexorably grown up. And, happy birthday to this.