Happy Birthday To Me

Or rather more accurately, happy birthday to this blog, which is four years old today. If my blog was a person, it would now be waving goodbye to its toddlerhood and preparing to wait nervously at the school gates, clinging to its mother's tracksuit bottoms and refusing to take the teary step into Junior Infants.

Or something.

I started this blog on January 9th 2005. My first post was titled 'The Beginning is Nigh', and was pretty brief;

This must be the 4th blog I have scattered across the internet.
Hopefully, I'll stick to this one.
Una

Inspiring, no? No, not quite.

I started the blog because Lili had one and we were followed by Burco that August. I guess we all used it as a way to communicate, because Lili was often out of the country and Burco was living in Barcelona by that stage. We blogged to post photos, keep each other up on what we were doing, and just have a laugh I guess.

I wasn't really aware of an Irish blogosphere at that stage. I mainly read random blogs, like Joe My God and early celebrity gossip blogs, that kind of stuff. I didn't feel any sense of community in blogging, I just thought it was just myself, a couple of friends, and random strangers in the US. So, I suppose, I blogged for myself and my mates, and not to contribute anything to a wider scene.

It has changed since then. Most of my early posts seem to revolve exclusively around music and boozing... oh right, so it hasn't changed much! Well, a little. At the time, I was in college and working for the Event Guide and doing occassional stuff for websites like the Hub's one (where myself and Lili and Burco photographed and reviewed gigs and got paid in blags and beer), and Cluas, and a couple of features for GCN that eventually got me out of music journalism and into more featurey stuff. So, there's a lot of posts about hanging out with Burco and Lili, going to every gig possible, interviewing bands and musicians and generally progressing through a period of time that was essentially a crash course in music journalism for me.

It was a pretty primative blog then, looking back on the early posts, I just threw up some interviews I was working on at the time (Juliette Lewis, Bloc Party, The Bravery and other bands 'o' the day and so on), freaking out about my college thesis, and seemingly never leaving Lili's flat at the time in Christchurch. They were fun times.

Since then...? Well, at some point, more than three people started reading it. I grew up a bit, got a 'serious' journalism job and the blog stayed with me. I still kept it a bit random, a bit music, a bit personal (although my *no hugging* policy on personal blogging stays with me, I try to talk about what I'm doing rather than what I'm feeling) and a lot pop culture. And then as people started reading, the 'UnaRocks' thing began to emerge as a weird sort of perceived image, not just the name of my blog (which I probably spent three seconds thinking about at the time) but as a warped reflection of who I am, almost a brand of sort. Now, sometimes, I think new people I meet who know me through reading this confuse the blog for the person. I think sometimes I meet people who read the blog and they expect me to be a crazy party animal non-stop music eccentric nutjob, which is not who I am. Either that or they seem to think I'm an arrogant dick for I guess what they see as 'pushing myself' online. Neither of these estimations are true. I'm actually an albino Scientologist nun. I may have forgotten to mention that over the years.

And then, I began to realise that there was actually a blogosphere, and I've met so many lovely awesome people through blogging; Nialler, Rick, Mulley, Swearing Lady, Aoife McIndieHour, Derek, and so on. Now I do feel like part of a community.

It's also been a bit of a hazzard when it comes to meeting new people or relationships. Let's put it like this: I am very easy to monitor! Everything is out there, my social life, my likes and dislikes, my opinions, my random thoughts. I don't know if that's a positive or negative thing. I don't know whether in the future I'll regret compiling an archive of my life online, or whether it will actually serve as a nice reminder.

It has always fascinated me that people actually read this. I don't think I've ever really played to an audience. Everything has always been rather simple. As I write for a living, blogging has always been a sort of light relief. So I've never sat down and 'composed' a post or anything like that. Normally I just click on the dashboard, click on create a new post, and just splurge.

So, there you go, four years on... and why do I blog? Fuck knows, homie!

Have a good weekend, and thanks for reading and commenting.

Una
x

PS: FYI, the photo above is the first picture I ever posted, it's YoCo, Sarah and myself in Dame Lane on New Year's Eve 2004, taken by Burco.