Today is my fifth blog birthday. Five years is a long time for anything to stick around on the internet. Yeeha!

This blog began as On the Wing of My Fancy back in 2001. It was encouraged by Dave and inspired by Yuccacentric and April's blog, which at the time was Starlit Dreams I believe. It started on Geocities back when Geocities was the least evil of the free hosts (I don't know, maybe they still are.) It moved to people.colgate.edu when I moved to Colgate and stayed there for as long as I did, until this fall when I finally bought a domain and webspace for it. It was faithfully powered by Blogger (albeit with occasional difficulties) from its birth when Blogger was still brand new until the recent switch to Greymatter. It went through so many comment systems of varying repute that most of the comments from the old days have been lost. It went through zillions of designs, none of them ready-made templates, demonstrating my gradually progressing html skills, my improving aesthetic taste, and my frequent preoccupation with dragons. It lived with varying degrees of vitality when a significant portion of my Colgate friends had jumped on the bandwagon and set up BlogSpot blogs, and after most of them had grown bored with it and jumped back off, and when Livejournal gradually rose as the new and convenient way for people to blog informally. It started as the ramblings of a moody teenager and gradually turned into the more carefully-crafted writings of an equally moody adult. The only thing that has really remained constant is the craving to write and share, although that too has waxed and waned through the years. But it has always been there, and thus, so has this.

Let's rewind a bit to the summer before I started to blog. I was a somewhat timid highschool almost-senior commuting to Cambridge three times a week to learn ancient Greek at Harvard. The vast majority of my classmates were college students, and at the time I felt very different from them. Though I pretty much remained a loner for most of the summer, I really looked up to a lot of them, especially the friendlier ones who took pains to make me feel included. It seems strange now that I can hardly remember their names.

Towards the end of the summer we were all sitting around -- it might have been after an exam -- and one of the girls was talking about the ridiculous reasons that she had taken up smoking in high school. All I can remember of her now is that she had dark hair and bold glasses, and a brazen manner in which she frequently expressed startling opinions. Reflecting on what she seemed to regard as the idiocy of her teens, she remarked "I hate the person I was five years ago. And five years from now I'm sure I'll hate the person I am today, you know?" I had a tendency in those days to take myself far too seriously, and for me five years was not yet a quarter of my lifetime. To me her revelation seemed astonishing. I wondered if I would ever feel that way about my past.

The short answer is yes. For the sake of completeness I still have all the old archives of this blog listed on the archives page, but I shudder when I go back and read the old ones. I really can't stand the inane drivel and whining of that stage and I would vastly prefer to pretend that it was someone else who wrote all that nonsense. But perhaps it's best that it should stand as a tribute to growth and change and being able to laugh at myself. That, at least, is something I can say I have learned at some point in these five years.

All the same, if you happen to go digging through the archives I strongly recommend that you avoid 2001 like the plague. In fact, throw out the first half of 2002 too. In fact, you might as well not tune in until the name change in September 2002 really. It's for the best. Trust me.

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, and/or linked to me over the years. I've been really lucky to be able to get to know so many neat people through blogging. In a sense it jumpstarted my whole social life at Colgate, and has sustained me in various ways ever since.

Happy five years Age-Old Songs.

Hey, you're reverse inspiring me to start mine up again someday. Keep the fire burning. And more song posts! Yay!

damn, it's almost like you were sitting there waiting for my birthday post to appear. instant gratification through comments!

i swear there will be more song posts now that i'm almost done being supermoody. =)

you know, i've done some pretty stupid things in my life, and i dont think i've done anything jaw-droppingly amazing...and while i wont go so far as to say i love who i was five years ago, at least i have no complaints regarding my past self. but maybe i'm just kidding myself :)

happy blog(birth)day!

I think if it weren't for the blog archives I wouldn't have a distinct enough memory of myself five years ago to despise it so much. Sure, I'd have a vague sense that I was an annoying teenager but not so much the painfully vivid details to hammer it home.

Fortunately that was five years ago. Yeah growth and change!

I need a disclaimer like that on all my old writing. Then again, the fact that I'm retyping the rabbit novel just proves that I'm a masochist when it comes to embarassing old writing.

Happy birthday! CK is five as well, and I find it hard to believe that i've spent that long working on the same damn webpage.

Something I love about being a permanent blogger, and being surrounded by permanent bloggers, is that once we got past the initial urge to delete the more immature bits of our archives we suddently acknowledged the existance of a wonderful cross-linked mosaic of our youth, with all sorts of forgotten emotions just waiting to be unearthed the next time we are patient enough to wince through them.

I don't know who i like less - LJers with protected archives or bloggers who habitually delete theirs.