Two years and counting

I had never really kept a diary in my entire life before, although I tried to many times. When I used to stroll past the school supply section of Walmart as a kid, I would grab one of those black and white composition books and toss it into the shopping cart for my mom to waste her money on.

You should see the collection of old notebook diaries I have. None of them last past much more than a few pages. The first page would always be written in the most perfect handwriting possible, followed by the slow but obvious regression towards sloppy chicken-scratch by Page 3. Or sometimes I would start off the first couple pages with a black roller-point pen and then subsequently lose the pen, forcing me to go with a blue Bic pen for the next couple pages... which would make me want to tear all of the fucking pages off and rewrite everything in good handwriting and in the same color ink. And then I would realize that I was becoming just like those typical middle school girls who spend their entire study hall periods neatly rewriting their class notes.

When I grew a little older I watched and admired Doogie Howser, M.D., so I tried my hand at keeping a journal on MS Word on the family computer, but quickly lost interest in that sort of silliness when I discovered what type of shows were on Cinemax on Saturday nights after 10 PM.

It became a cyclical thing, me going somewhere like Barnes & Noble every now and then to buy a brand new blank journal, but never having the discipline to write in it for more than a few pages.

Years later, I decided to start blogging. I began my blogging career with a short-lived LiveJournal page that, if you read through it, you could tell would be a definite precursor of things to come in the future. I’m not sure that I even quite knew what blogging was at the time, but what’s amusing upon reading those nine entries on my LJ is that even back then, I wrote about the same basic things that I write about today: poo, masturbation, religion, being drunk, and being bored with life.

During the weeks that I kept an LJ, my sister told me I was a natural at blogging and tried to encourage me to do it more often, but I just wasn’t too interested in it at that point. I figured that in a few weeks, my whole blogging phase would blow over. One thing I was very interested in, however, was all of the new technologies attached to blogging (which by 2004 was already a pretty established phenomenon), such as RSS. Figuring it would be a good way for me to learn about this stuff, I decided to end my run on LJ and on March 16, 2004, I secured my own domain at ill-noise.com so I could blog regularly on my own site. My only reason for starting up the site was because I wanted to practice and improve my web design skills. Little did I know that ill-noise.com would soon become my outlet for practing and improving my writing skills.

How I came to love blogging was during the summer of 2004 when I spent a couple months in New York to take a summer session course at Columbia University. I decided to write about my daily experiences there so that my family and friends could simply see what I was up to, and while doing so I realized just how therapeutic writing could be in curing homesickness. I also quickly discovered the charm of blogging. Every afternoon, I would ride the train down to Manhattan’s Bryant Park and open up my laptop to blog about my day, and I would look up to see dozens of other bloggers around me — all scattered throughout the park, all wearing the same black-rimmed glasses, and all using the same free WiFi hotspot that Bryant Park provided. It was a fun time, spending my summer blogging about my adventures in New York, and looking at other people’s blogs and commenting on theirs.

As of today, I’ve been at it for two years now. People sometimes ask me if I will continue blogging for the rest of my life, and my answer is I really don’t see how I could even go a week without it (although with my busy schedule lately, I always seem to be coming very close). It’s funny to me now how I used to never be able to keep up a diary — be it from a lack of discipline or a fear of having nothing to say — because these days I find little else as rewarding as documenting the humor I find in my life onto my website, forever archiving the story of my life.

Anyway. Happy 2nd birthday, ill-noise.com.