The Baconator tagged me with The Evolution Meme. The idea is that I list five old posts that I think are reflective of the evolution of this blog.
This is a hard meme, at least it feels difficult. I mulled over which post to start with. After all there almost 5,100 to choose from. But the real reason this is so hard is that I cringe when I see some of the crap I posted. I am tempted to nuke the old stuff.
In the end I opted to go for the default answer and choose my first post.
I started this blog on a lark. It was a whim, an impulsive move. I hadn’t any plan or intention to do this for very long at all. The opening is pretty plain, just a few words about myself and not much else.
It is a little after midnight on the day 22nd anniversary of my Bar-Mitzvah. At 35 I have a house, have been married for 8.5 years, have a 3.5 year-old son and another child on the way.
No word yet as to the sex, other than it is a healthy baby. And so begins the start of my blog adventure. I cannot say where this journey will take me, or whether I’ll enjoy it, but for tonight I am willing to venture out into the wild and woolly web.
2) As my second choice in the evolution of the blog I have to pick Life Is Challenging. This is the post in which I discovered that this could be a place in which to air my inner feelings about anything. It is still hard to look back and read the old material, but this was different.
3) I have really struggled with trying to decide what post to pick for number three. For now I’ll select A Moment In Time- Perspective for the coming Shabbos. It was an early introspective moment that didn’t make me cringe. The writing wasn’t great, but it has elements of the voice and style I currently use.
4) Somewhere between the end of 2005 and 2006 I began to really hit my stride. My posts got more comments and my readership increased exponentially. There were a number of posts about blogging that got quite a bit of attention and still drive traffic. One of my favorites is the Shola Rhodes Nigerian scammer series.
The series and the attention it generated within the j-blogosphere made me realize that I really had become part of a community. It also made me laugh because I received a ton of email from new bloggers asking for my assistance in getting established. I hadn’t been blogging for all that long and found it kind of funny that anyone thought that I was an authority on it.
5) This post has taken hours to write, although they were not spent consecutively. It is not easy to try and sift through so many posts and come up with some substance. There are many posts that deserve attention. These days I think that some of the best are those that deal with family matters as well as life events. A recent example is The Final Goodbye.
I think that posts like that one work because I found a common theme that we can all relate to and managed to portray it in an easy to follow manner.
One more comment. I also think that part of the reason that this meme was so hard is that it feels exceptionally self-indulgent. It just feels awkward and uncomfortable, or maybe that is just because I am wearing a pair of jeans that are 6 sizes too small. Hmmm..