Timelines

I do this really weird thing with my blog. I pre- and post-date items all the time. Sometimes I've started writing something and then finished it up much later and sometimes I just willfully change the date. I like to bury some of the more personal items so that they don't appear at the top of the front page. It's not that I mind people reading them, otherwise this would not be a public blog, but I just don't want those items to draw that much focus right away.

It's a somewhat strange habit and today I wondered if I would ever look back at this blog and try to reconstruct my life from it. And if I would believe that I got a haircut before I took boards, because that, in fact, happened a week later.

I also like changing the date because I can enter things in for my own searchable history, such as quotes, words of the day and poetry that I'm not really trying to share. Maybe I'll just randomly start entering things from the year 2000 - if there is anything under that year, it was definately entered late because as of this writing, there is nothing in 2000 and I only started writing in Blogspot in 2007. Yes, even those posts in 2006 were entered later, although they were, in fact, written or posted on the days indicated, just on another blog site.

Was thinking of my first journals today. I remember reading them again later and being disgusted with 13-year-old-me's writings and deciding to clean the slate by getting rid of them. I sometimes regret that decision, but mostly because of the strong visual image (and visceral responce) I have to the first page of any journal I ever wrote. It was a VISITOR sticker put onto a sheet of lined paper. It was from the time I visited my father at an Indiana state treatment center for alcoholics. I didn't even know what it meant, but I remember that my dad was different there than other times I'd seen him - maybe less funny, but more stable. That was how I first started journaling.

Note: after posting this, I changed the date on it and I realize that part of my neurosis about this date-changing business is that I like each post to appear on a different day. Often writing one post leads me to another topic or tangent that becomes its own post, and I like them to appear in order, but not as though they were written at the same time. I wonder why that matters to me?