Seen you on Aldebaran, safe on the green desert sand

[austin_dern]

I need to pause a bit in the endless recounting of events that happened weeks ago because of one of those wonderful things I noticed looking at my profile page: today's is my two thousandth entry on this journal. Since I've kept very nearly scrupulously to publishing exactly one entry per day this means I do have a nice two-thousand-day stretch of consistently posting at least a couple of paragraphs of whatever happened to be on my mind. (It doesn't disillusion anyone, I hope, to mention that I usually write these up ahead of time, usually a couple days ahead but if I've got a really good theme I've been as much as a week ahead of ``deadline'', except for the humor pieces. Those, well, I try to write early but deciding what to write about is really hard.) It's not always necessarily interesting to anyone but myself, and sometimes I wonder what I was hoping for in writing some of the stuff I've seen, but I still feel accomplished for reaching the goal.

Originally I hadn't figured to make it a daily compulsion. My intent was just to get something like a hundred or so entries in on something very like a schedule so that the journal wouldn't be one of those where you run across an old friend, are delighted that he has a journal, and find that there are only six entries, the last of which is ``whoops, sorry I haven't updated this in five months'', and that was two years ago. That it turned into an unstoppable compulsion or my own little un-monetarizable daily essay was probably inevitable, but I never really act on my knowledge of just how I'll behave ahead of time when it would be useful.

There aren't any grand dedications of where I want to take the journal in the future. For now I'm just amazed enough that I have stuck to it for two thousand days with just a few complications (I've missed and backdated a few entries where Livejournal or my ISP was gone for critical hours; and I did shift to my just-after-midnight schedule by posting two entries, one before and one after midnight, without my having gone to bed in-between; and I've freely used time zone gimmicks to my advantage). My only real regret is that I didn't start the journal a year earlier, which would have given me the chance to record my thoughts of the SARS crisis in Singapore as I was living through it, as that may be (with luck) the most exciting mass public event I'll be on the scene for. Instead I have copies of e-mails sent friends and things I wrote after the fact, which isn't as interesting. But if I'd done that I'd be well past two thousand entries by now, and then what would I have to write about today?

Trivia: 18 July 1969 was also the third anniversary of Apollo 11 Command Module pilot Michael Collins's first spaceflight, on Gemini 10. Source: First On The Moon, ``Written With'' Gene Farmer, Dora Jane Hamblin, and trying very hard to pass itself off as written by the Apollo 11 astronauts.

Currently Reading: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, Graham Robb. By the way, this is a neat book, and it makes me realize how unimaginably tiny most science fiction worlds are.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

I am unsurprised some of these might be written well in advance, particularly the humor Fridays.

I wonder just exactly how many of those two thousand I've written int he comments of; I'd imagine quite a lot. Commenting in your LJ is usually easier and more fun than writing in my own, which is about the best compliment I can thing to give on your bimillenial post.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Aw, my, thank you. I believe you're the most common correspondent in my journal, although I forget where the tools for actually measuring that are. Actually it makes me feel worse that I don't write more in your journal to its postings. I'm sorry that I don't spend enough time writing to the people who deserve it.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Ahh, If I were updating more you might have minor if still unnecessary guilty moments. Writing my own LJ is one of those things that gets back-burnered now that I have a covivant and Anthrocon Board business to keep up with, two things that occupy together at least 20 hours of my time a week and at high priority.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Understandably so. Part of what's left it relatively easy to keep my daily entries going is that while I do have this enormous glomming of time for something that other people identify as work-shaped, it does leave me with free time to think about what to write (the hard part) and then to write it (often pretty zippy).

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

You were the first person to comment in my journal when I started it, and thus were the first person I friended. Presumably you are also the first person to have friended me, though I don't know for certain. My journal started a few months after yours though has been updated far less frequently.

Thank you for sharing it with us.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm glad I was so early to find your journal. I'm not sure how I did discover it, but I like thinking that I was the first person to friend you. Thank you.

[moonfires.livejournal.com]

It's so very lonely, you're two thousand light years from home.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Same earworm here upon reading the entry title. Good choice.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Huh. I didn't realize it'd be that potent. I was just looking for something that got all 2000-y in the theme.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

Well, the fact that I learned to play it to sing in filk circles (not very well, I fear -- the melody is either not suited to my voice or requires some vocal technique I need to learn) may have boosted its recognizeability and its earworm potential for me.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, that'll increase its earworming potential enormously.

I hope you at least like the song. I don't mean to inflict anything on the mind that's annoying.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

With luck, though, I'll be somewhere home by number 4000.