Carolyn Castiglia

So, I inadvertently picked a strange day to finally throw some energy into my Tumblr, since today’s the day it was announced Yahoo is buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Big tech deals like that always feel gross to us users, right? I remember when Yahoo bought Flickr years ago - Flickr kind of became irrelevant after that, mostly because Facebook also became a photo sharing site. That’s the thing about Facebook - it will never die, because it wants to be all things to all people. They want your tweets, your Instagrams, your game time, your emails, your chats. They’ve got the Facebook Phone - although that’s not going so well. They’re your news source, right? Facebook is everything! And yet, it’s the worst, isn’t it? I mean, it’s just like crack that way. It’s the greatest and we’re so addicted but it’s ruining our lives.

I sort of miss old-school blogging. Pre-social media blogging, which admittedly didn’t last long, but like, it was so good. It was so *nerdy.* There was really nothing cool about it, which is what made it so cool! A bunch of nerds would like get together and go out and take pictures and it was like a secret society and then we would all post about it on our blogs and it meant something because we had found a way to come together in our solitary confinement. When you made someone’s blog roll it was a big deal. It was like becoming blood brothers. There was an understanding: we are now bonded for life, son. #word #press

Aaaaaand I just hashtagged a paragraph, so I guess that shows you how much has changed in the last decade of online commentary. I’m tired, so I don’t know if any of this is worth sharing, but that’s sort of the whole point, right? This is like my Doogie Howser, M.D. evening sign-off daily recap thought vomit. My Carrie Bradshaw contemplation. My “secret public journal,” as I always thought was so clever of Mike Birbiglia to call it, back in the days of shows upstairs at Mo Pitkin’s, just about 7 years ago, I know, because that’s how old my daughter is, and she was born while we were all there. It’s gone now, blogging as I knew it is gone now, holding a thought in and working with it until it’s a thing worth sharing is gone now.

Life goes by fast, not so much before you turn 30, but after that it starts to get ever-increasingly faster. What do we want to do with our time? How do you want to remember your life? As a flurry of tweets? Do you want to look back on a bunch of pictures you took at events you don’t remember because you weren’t actually present you were just trying to take a bunch of cute pictures so you could be tagged in them on Facebook so you could say you were there with those people and everyone would know you were important and cool?

Or do you want to be like Doogie Howser with your best friend crawling into your window at night because he loves you so much he can’t go to sleep without saying goodnight first?