It's Verbatim's Bar Mitzvah Year!

You guys, it's my blogiversary! On this date 13 YEARS AGO I posted my first entry in this blog. Steph was 7, Pete was about to turn 5, and Julie was a wee 2-year-old. (I've been 39 this entire time, which is a pretty cool trick.)

I was looking back through the archives, and I noticed that sometimes I posted more than once in the same day, and often just a quick sentence or two. The thing is, back then there was no "social media"—you couldn't just pop on to Twitter with a quick quip or post family news on Facebook* or upload a new photo to Instagram or a recipe to Pinterest (which I'm still not on). None of that existed yet, which is pretty amazing to think about.

As always, I want to thank those of you who are reading this for reading this. I've gone from blogging daily to blogging monthly (if that), and I believe that's mostly a function of those other social media platforms I just mentioned. But I hope to keep kicking around here for a while yet. So please do stay in touch with me here, and/or on Twitter (that's where I'm most active—41,657 tweets and counting!), and/or on Facebook, and/or via email if that's how you roll. Connecting with all of you warm, smart, interesting, creative, funny people is the reason I'm here.

*In fact FB had just launched a few weeks earlier, but it was entirely for Harvard students at that time. Guess what, I still have my actual "face book" from Wesleyan! For the young'uns in the crowd, before computers, freshmen—excuse me, first-year students—got an actual printed booklet with a photo of every classmate, along with where they were from, what their interests were (mine were "Music, People"—oy), and what they were planning to study (I wrote "Humanities," which at the time I thought meant "all the liberal arts things I'm interested in, like English and psychology"). There were no email addresses or cell phone numbers because, well, those things didn't exist yet. It looked like the senior section of a high school yearbook, and we did indeed call it the "freshman face book." If you saw someone interesting in the cafe or in one of your classes, you'd race back to your room and look for their photo in the face book to find out their name. 

Comments

[Elena]

Mazel Tov!

[Susan]

And I've been with you almost from the beginning! My blogging is done I think - I still have a blogger page.

I also still have my Look Book from my freshman year at Occidental College. :)

Happy blogiversary!

[Tonya Watkins]

OMG, me, too! We started our blogs within a day or two of each other. My kiddo was a senior in high school, a couple of months out from graduating. It's astounding how things have changed since then (and it honestly doesn't seem all that long ago...)