TEN YEARS?

Holy shit.  I've had this blog for 10 years.  I haven't used it a great deal in the most recent years, but I never plan to delete it.  Maybe I'll back-date my old livejournal entries into it.  Maybe one day this will form part of my memoires.  I don't know, but I'm amazed I've lasted as long as I did, even though I naively thought I would never call it a "blog" when I started. 

I was studying computer animation when I began this journal.  The world had changed a month and a half before, when icons of my childhood came crashing down.  I was living in Toronto, working at the ROM and at Heretic and just barely existing at the poverty line.  I was dating Rick.  This blog would see me through that relationship, which taught me how to love a man and how to respect him for who he was, and then it would see me through the tumultuous long-distance affair with Gareth. (By the way, Rick, congratulations on your upcoming marriage to Kat !)  It saw me in Toronto, working for a politician, and selling my art (or not selling as the case tended to be) at conventions.  It saw me go back to school after a period of finding myself.  It saw renewed enthusiasm for learning and direction and personal ambition.  It witnessed death and loss, anger and joy and contentment.  It saw me abandon security for risk as I moved first for an internship to Winnipeg and then terrifyingly far away to Whitehorse.  It followed me back to Ontario into the life I now lead.  I can look back and see constants relected here, and the changeable, and the things I thought would be forever that ended up the least permanent of all.  I can see myself growing into my skin and becoming a person I both respect and admire.

A toast, then, to longevity and commitment, and the written word.