DON'T READ THIS

Well, I held out as long as anyone could expect.
I've been an avid facebooker for quite a while. On occasion friends have made the suggestion that I create a blog, and sure, I've daydreamed about it a time or two, but I always hesitated.
What is a blog supposed to be, anyway?
Perhaps it's a diary with no lock or key. I've never had much success keeping a diary though. I received a diary on nearly every birthday from ages 8 to 18. Each time I got one, I would write in it religiously for three or four days, mostly about my birthday. In subsequent sporadic entries, I would begin by apologizing to my diary for having neglected it. Eventually I would retire the miserable specimen to a keepsake box.
Maybe instead of a diary, a blog is sort of an open letter. As a young woman I romanticize the art of letter writing, but only because it's a dying form. Ironic considering that as a child I protested writing even short thank-you notes to relatives for the lovely birthday presents. Kids like me may well have killed the art of letter writing. And now we're trying to resurrect it by sharing a hyperlink to our lives.
Interestingly enough, letters and discarded diaries can be found side by side in keepsake boxes I still have. The idea for a keepsake box came about in high school, and it was the perfect companion for those dark days. It was just a shoebox where I would put awards I had been given, cards people had sent me for birthdays or Christmas, innocent enough notes that had been passed in school, and other assorted scraps of paper that seemed significant to me at the time. Prone to gloomy moods at that time, I could count on the contents of that box to cheer me up a little bit at least.
In later years, the keepsake box evolved into keepsake bags: gift bags (usually Sanrio) filled with drawings people gave to me, old photographs, a diary or two, letters and postcards that were sent to me, some that I never sent, stickers, wedding invitations, funeral programs, ticket stubs, sketchbooks, and so on. The effect of sorting through these bags was still the same, with a little less cringing.
I had a sit-and-sort recently when my sister dropped off a load of things she had stored for me while I was living in Mexico. I hadn't looked at my keepsakes in a couple of years. And I realized that those bags hadn't been added to in that amount of time. If I gathered all my bits from Mexico, I probably could fill a new keepsake bag, but I hadn't been storing things that way there.
Honestly, a lot of my treasures these days are stored in a different sort of keepsake box--my computer. I've got thousands of photos, tons of drivel I wrote for school, a few things I wrote for experiment, music I hunted down on the internet or downloaded from friends, photos and videos and artwork and writing and music that my friends and their friends have created or found, and more.
And now this will be in there too, so anyone can find it if they're sifting through and decide to give it a second glance. And I'll uncover it later and reminisce.