Yesterday I went to the gym around noon. After getting back from there, I went with five or so other people to go apple picking. I came away with almost 10 pounds of apples, about a quarter pound of raspberries (including a breed I had never seen before, which was yellow), and a half-dozen great donuts (which are all gone now. What was the point of even going to the gym?)

Also, that event, if not that date, marks one year of blogging. (This post wasn't the first one, but the two before it were just experimenting and stuff.) Sooo... what's changed in the past year? Anything? What's blogging done for me? Again - anything?

Well, the first question - some things have definitely changed. I'm now more assertive, motivated, and outgoing than I was a year ago. Writing pointed responses to angry e-mails I've got for my CT writing, being a substitute teacher, starting to take anti-depressants, finally reaching some kind of stable state between me and Gretchen, kissing Katye - all that would have been almost unimaginable in the fall of 2003. So things have definitely changed for the better, but I'm not sure that they've changed enough.

Fuck, I was just about to list all the problems I didn't manage to fix - but overly critical much? What, did I expect to go from loser to Renaissance man in six weeks or less? Things are better, so it would be pretty damn stupid of me to list all the reasons they aren't perfect. I have stuff to aim for, goals in mind, more ways I could improve - there's nothing bad about that.

As for blogging? I don't know, it's been fun. It's hardly what I had originally thought it would be - %50 diary, %40 fiction, %10 politics or philosophical musing or whatever. It didn't take me long to realize that a weblog was a bad format for fiction. And I might have made an effort to write more and post it on the server space that UR provides, but the CT took priority - I never had the time or motivation to set up that web page and write enough fiction to make it worthwhile. I've just been using this mostly as a diary. I've censored it a bit because (as I've explained before) there's always stuff I wouldn't want everyone to know about, but other than that I've been using this just like I used to use a journal kept with Word on a Zip disc, and before that with a pen on paper. To organize my thoughts and think about things more deeply - with the added benefit of getting feedback once in a while. Politics has appeared now and then, and I plan to do another political post soon, but basically, well, it's just for fun.