I maintained a Livejournal account from March 2002 through November 2009 and am now trying to decide what to do with it. Looking back through, I really wish I’d kept an actual blog instead, or at least in addition– it’s a mix of personal things that wouldn’t be blog-appropriate and comments on current events and my studies that absolutely would, and it definitely would have been a good idea to separate those out and put the latter group somewhere else. Somewhere like…well, here. I guess I thought that if I didn’t put everything I had to say into entries that would pop up in people’s LJ friends feeds, they wouldn’t read it. But now I’ve either realized that that’s not true, or don’t care if it is. Briefly in 2005 I had a separate account called Gretchen_study which was specifically about religion and evolution, but I didn’t maintain it.
Oh, and all of the photos are gone because I hosted them at Photoisland.com which then shut down. Yes, I had copies, but those were kept on a laptop which was later stolen. Let that be a lesson– back up your stuff, in several places.
If you have an interest in hearing what it was generally like to move in England and do an MA on religion and culture in 2003, here’s where that starts. If you want to read what it was like to move to Denmark in 2005 and do a PhD on religion and cognition, that begins here. If you don’t want to do either one, I don’t blame you in the slightest.
Reading through old entries, I see that I was a vastly more upbeat, optimistic person then. I expected things to turn out well, and was disappointed when they didn’t. That is a tendency which has, shall we say, diminished a bit.