Today is my birthday. If you asked me a year ago where I would be on my birthday, I certainly would never guess that I would be sitting in Boca Raton with my mother AND Sophia, who flew in all the way from Los Angeles just for my birthday. I’m not in a talkative mood lately, so I’ll tell you more about Century Village later in the week. Sometimes I feel pressured to write something here, thinking that if I don’t blog at least three times a week, you will abandon me, which is probably true, but it is also important to remind myself that I exist outside of this blog.
Today, Sophia, my mother, and I took a drive into West Palm Beach, once the home to the rich and famous, now a city taken in by Ponzi Schemes, and checked out two museums, The Flagler and the Norton. We also found an ice cream parlor where the chocolate ice cream was deemed by People Magazine as the “best in the country.”
March 7th is also the birthday of my blog. I started Citizen of the Month on my birthday in 2005. My template is exactly the same today as it was on that day four years ago, having spent the day before my birthday in 2005 “designing” my header in Illustrator. It amuses me that so little has changed with my blog in those four years. There is still no advertising, and the blog remains consistently uneven, ranging from the stupid to the emotionally distraught.
I’m not particularly proud of my last year as a blogger. I spent too much time on Twitter and ignored my blogging friends. Twitter is so focused on “followers,” that I began to perceive some bloggers as more worthy of my attention than others, as if networking and cliquishness was the ‘real’ point of being online, not the writing, or the community spirit. I believe the online world has given me the opportunity to become a better person, not a worse one, and I failed considerably. I might seriously dump Twitter when I return to New York, because I don’t like myself when I am Twittering.
I am inspired by those of you who blog honestly, comment freely, and show a sense of community. I look up to you. As I enter my fifth year of blogging, I want to thank you for another year as my blogging friends.
