Last week I realized my site was gone.
Kaput.
Sent to the graveyard of neglected blogs.
I contacted my hosting company, Bluehost, who said, “Sorry you missed a payment and your blog is gone-gone. Like, we totally put it on a row boat, set it on fire, and pushed it out to sea.”
Upon hearing that my blog was dead, a calmness washed over me.
I wasn’t angry or sad–I was mostly stunned.
I’ve had this blog for at least 12 years (I’m too lazy to see when I started it) and losing it felt like a little piece of me drifting into the ether. It is the digital record of my early days as a single, emotionally loud twenty-something assistant living in Los Angeles who moved to Austin to become a writer. It chronicles my slow evolution from working three part-time jobs seven days a week to becoming a working professional to meeting my partner (who I’ve now been with for 8 1/2 years) to writing a movie with him to becoming a full-time writer. The blog is also my repository of pop culture ramblings, thoughts on family & friends and life & death, and essays on anxiety. (There’s also a fair amount of posts on Jeff Goldblum and Rick Moranis.)
Though my blog never had a true theme and was never written in a way to garner legions of fans and copious amounts of money, I’m proud of it and it’s garnered me a lot of work and I love it and I love all the people I’ve met through it. (If you’re reading this, THANK YOU.) Even though I don’t write on this blog much anymore, the thought of it disappearing with the snap of a finger felt equal parts comical and devastating. And also like a major first-world problem. It feels remarkably dumb to be melancholic over losing a blog.
The night I lost my blog, I slept an uneasy sleep, mourning something I spent years creating but obviously never fully owned. I woke up to a phone call from Bluehost’s parent company apologizing for the inconvenience, saying my site was restored and that they would be comping me three months of hosting services. All of this happened because I bitched about it on Twitter. (Twitter is good for some things.)
So now my site is living and breathing again, and I figured I should write on the ol’ gal for Christ’s sake.
I know blogging in general is an antiquated practice (gosh I miss the blogging days of the mid-aughts), and I know I promise myself to write on here more often and I don’t, but I’ll try. I’ll try because I can’t quite let go.
8 Comments
The reasons you wrote about having your blog are exactly the reason I followed you – truly authentic.
Wow, Barb! Thank you so much for that. It means so much to me. <3
I started following your blog a decade ago, a copywriter in training in my first year of university. There was always something about your blog that felt like a real voice piercing through blogging noise, not overly edited or gimmicky. Thank you for keeping it alive, even for nostalgia sake x
Awww Tish! Thank you so much! <3
I don’t know how I found your blog, but I’ve enjoyed it… and then I read that you are in Pittsburgh, PA now. SUPER AWESOME. I was born and raised here, and am resigned to dying here. I like my people. I hope you find awesome people here, as well.
(Maybe we’ll run into each other at some art/writing/theater event.)
Sadly, I just moved back to CO, but Pittsburgh holds a very special place in my heart. It’s a wonderful city. You should be proud of being a Pittsburgher!
Happy to have found you via Geoff at the Key West Film Festival! Here’s hoping the feature film might appear in next year’s fest.
Interesting about Jeff Goldblum, my favorite movie of his is “ Into the Night”. Michelle Pheiffer was also great in this movie and if I ever move back to cold weather, I would have to get a red leather jacket (maybe without shoulder pads) like hers in the movie.
I’m glad you take good care of Geoff and Fat face, they both seem very deserving, although I find it hard to believe someone who lived in Austin did not know the music of Robert Earl Keen.
I’m sorry I couldn’t talk more with him (and sorry if I monopolized the conversation), but as I told him, I had to get home to feed my cats, as I’d been watching movies since 10:30am. He was kind and definitely a keeper for you. Thank you both!
Maybe it’s that text itself is disappearing. After all, the first visitors to the web spent their time online reading web magazines. Then came blogs, then Facebook, then Twitter. Now it’s Facebook videos and Instagram and SnapChat that most people spend their time on. There’s less and less text to read on social networks, and more and more video to watch, more and more images to look at. Are we witnessing a decline of reading on the web in favor of watching and listening?