Fourth Blogiversary!

I think it was bad timing for me to start this blog the day after my birthday. Two celebrations back to back always seems excessive. Ah well, that's how it is. This blog has now been my home on the internet for four years. The same length of time that I was in college. Makes me feel old, as if that birthday yesterday wasn't enough.

My blogging frequency has dropped off considerably over the past year. My blog reading has also become a lot less frequent. Some of that is because many of the blogger friends I made at my blogging peak 2-3 years ago have been blogging a lot less, too, but it's also that I've found other ways to distract myself. Real life activities start to encroach on internet activities. Really, most of my blogging was done when I should have been working, so I guess I've just become a little better at doing what I'm supposed to (though this post itself proves there are exceptions).

I don't know how much longer I'll be able to keep this up, given changing priorities and new "distractions." I expect I'll keep on like this for a little while: dropping by once or twice a month to post about something that interests me or something fun I've done in Hawaii, and checking in on other blogs once in a while as well. I'll also be around Twitter, which is a bit easier to take because of the small dose size.

But I'm not willing to give up this online life of mine yet. The ability to find so many cool people with shared interests is one of the great things about the internet. In a way, I started this blog four years ago because I didn't feel like there were enough people like me, and I wanted to be recognized. But over the years I have found so many people like me. None exactly like me, but people with significant overlaps. I'm pleased and proud to find myself a member of such a community.

The relationships I've made online are also a special sort of relationship. People I know solely online can't know me in quite the same way people who know me in person do--how I sound carrying a conversation, or my immediate reaction to certain situations--but with the partial anonymity that the internet provides, I feel more free to share certain things here than I do in real life. People who have read this blog know some things about me no one I know in person knows. Maybe some day I'll meet a blog friend in real life. Not sure what would happen then.

Anyway, I'd better stop with all this sentimentality. In celebration of four years of blogging, I'm going to do something I haven't done on this blog before...

Me with an ancient Hawaiian petroglyph on the Big Island last year.

There. Sorry there's a hat. You know, it was actually quite hard to find an interesting photo of me without sunglasses. I do live in Hawaii, after all.