milestones

(and some new pics of Aremid)

February 16, 2007:

I’m sure I’ll spend plenty of time redesigning this site, and I’ll second-guess myself for starting this site, and I’ll face some sort of unpleasant reaction sooner or later, but it’s time to get going with this Toastiest site.

I haven’t second-guessed myself for starting the site, but I’m always second-guessing what I’m putting on this site. I’ve had my own website since 1995 and kept some form of journal since 1989. Having a blog seemed like a natural progression of both. However, what should I be blogging about? How much should I be sharing with the world?

I’m not going to go through three years of public LiveJournal entries to determine if there’s anything I regret having out there in the blogosphere. I know that I’ve had some pretty vitriolic comments just in the past couple of months. Opinions due change, so I may regret some opinions I’ve expressed in the past, but there are some basic raw beliefs I have.

There were 700 our so LiveJournal posts that I brought over to this blog, written between 2004 and 2007. Two-thirds of those remain untagged, just because I haven’t spent much time on cataloging. To be sure, the vitriol didn’t subside when I began Toastiest. However, I do often cringe when I discover that someone else I know is reading this. I worry that they are surprised and squeamish to find such high levels of seemingly intractable anger and melancholy. I sometimes retreat for awhile from any brash emotional display, but then I have one of those “jump the shark” moments where I let it all hang out, and it stays out there for perpetuity.

I just attempted to summarize my views on religion. That’s a tall order, and I don’t really wish to do that right now. I wish that my LiveJournal tags had migrated over here to WordPress; they didn’t. That would’ve made it easier to summarize my views on topic X or topic Y.

I do try to steer clear of religion more now than I once did. But the thoughts…the rants…are all out there. And after three years, there are plenty of entries on all sorts of subjects that I’ve vented my views on, wisely or not.

I’m going to change my Google mail signature to point to toastie.st. I imagine that some people who never knew I had a blog will be taken aback. I do have some trepidation of sharing this site with those who have known me much of my life and with those who just barely know me. But life is too fleeting for such worries

I suppose that’s essentially what I was saying here in 2010 a couple of paragraphs back. I don’t think I pointed my Gmail signature to this website for very long. But my Flickr site pointed to it (until two days). My Facebook profile points to it, but I don’t let all my Facebook contacts see the link. But my Facebook posts reference my Flickr pics…and my Twitter account, that mostly contains updates for this blog…so just about everyone who knows me has found this blog whether I intended for them to do so or not.

Yet, for all the people who know that David’s blog is Toastiest, and that Toastie is David (or, actually, more often, Dave), I still resist putting my full name anywhere on the blog or my Twitter account or my Flickr account. There is really only one reason left for this bit of faux-privacy-enforcement. I am paranoid that someday, down the road, when I may desperately need employment, I’ll be Googled, this blog will pop up, and I’ll be doomed. There’s probably already such a hyperlink out there, and I do often consider just sticking my full name on here so I’m not hiding behind a moniker. Not yet.

And there’s still the non-public blog, which shall remain non-public. A few people do have and others have had access to these posts at various times over the past three years, but I suspect I’ll be more reluctant going forward to grant this access to anyone else. Personal blogging is a tricky undertaking. I’m still trying to figure out what works best for me.

I gradually stopped writing semi-private posts in LiveJournal. I wrote completely private entries for my own use for awhile, but those have dwindled, too, as the public venting of private thoughts serves as some catharsis, however sane or not that may be. I still am trying to figure out what works best here.