Joe of bostonsteamer points out that “today is a really special day for bloggers. It’s the five year anniversary of the “girl on a bike” story.” You know what this means, right? Only three more days till the fifth anniversary of my girl on a bike MetaFilter double post!
Anyway, this bit Joe wrote really got to me because I remember exactly what he’s talking about, the way things used to be:

It’s fun to look back on the old days of blogging, when everyone was so wide-eyed and naive. People really opened their hearts so their readers could take a look inside. Every blogger had the same “coming of age”, where they’d post something that hurt another person, and after the fallout they’d realize, “hey, what I blog about really does affect my meatspace life.”

Maybe in the same way that you can’t call yourself a writer till you’ve actually gotten paid for your writing, you’re not really a blogger until your blog has screwed you in real life somehow?
A while back I had someone I really cared about tell me he didn’t trust me, because I was indiscreet and would post all sorts of secrets, never mind that I’ve never actually done that to anyone. I called him out on it and he apologized and took it back, but I couldn’t tell if the apology was sincere or at least as honest as the accusation, and anyway he’d already struck a chord; things changed after that. So then when Justin Hall went and had his infamous breakdown not a month later I took it very hard, as did most everyone I know who’s been putting personal stuff up for at least four or five years, before blogging really took off.
My natural impulse both online and off is always to share of myself. I’ve never done it expecting anything back, but generosity has always led to receiving so much from others in turn: laughter, affection and best of all friendship. So many of the relationships I cherish most today are with people I’ve met because of the web that I haven’t really done much thinking about whether living like I do has pre-emptively scared anyone away.
I did tell Clay once that I feel like I have more privacy now, because everyone assumes that I share everything and so it never occurs to anyone that there might be things I keep just for myself, and you can’t ask after what you don’t even know exists, after all. But now I find myself wondering how many times I’ve dooced my personal life without even knowing it. I know at the end of the day it’s really someone else’s loss if they choose not to value me as a friend, but I hate giving up on people and I hate the thought of people giving up on me. I don’t know what I’m really trying to say here—let me know if you do—but I do know what I want to say: please don’t give up on me. Buy me a beer if you must, sing a stupid song with me at karaoke if you can, keep reading if you want to, but don’t give up.

As most of you probably know, I recently finished up with grad school; my portfolio and resume are more than three years old and therefore badly in need of updating, so of course the first thing I did was… redesign this here weblog. Here are a few of my thoughts behind the overhaul:

• I’ve been writing about food over at A Full Belly since April and I’ve really come to like being able to write short posts over there, which I’ve never been comfortable doing on here mainly because of how I’d laid the site out. So the biggest part of this redesign was switching the menu to the top and bottom of the pages to make room on the side for my new links log quick bites, mainly inspired by Andy, Simon Carless and, natch, Anil‘s late lamented sidebar. For those of you who prefer things syndicated, it comes with its own feeds: RSS 2.0 and Atom.
• If you read the site via RSS 2.0, you’ll now get to see the comments and trackbacks for every post. If you’d like to do the same with your feeds: Simple RSS Customization.
• No more static header graphic anywhere in the near future, no matter what I put up there I get sick of it eventually! I love being able to share my life via moblog with all my friends on Flickr and so I decided I would make the photos more accessible to my regular readers as well, hence the thumbnails of my nine most recent photos at the top of the page.
• Comments are awesome, but like Heather I too hate zeros. Current solution: make a little pixelly comment balloon in Photoshop and stick that in. I think it’s super cute but is it inviting enough? Do you prefer knowing how many people have commented already, or are you willing to break the ice? Please let me know, I’m more than happy to tweak with this for usability’s sake.

Next two things will be reintroducing a blogroll, as I’ve sorely missed having one, and finally (finally!) adding tags.

lia: best product name ever?
lia: “Coochy Shave – Extra Gentle Shaving Lotion For Private Areas”
andrew: haha
andrew: i shave with “taint” cream

Ah, so meta it hurts.
Also: I really miss having Alaina reachable by subway. Bah.

I can’t remember when or how exactly I stumbled onto Joel Derfner’s A Search For Love in Manhattan, but I do know that I was so impressed by the quality of his writing that I spent the next few hours reading through the entire archives until I was fully caught up, and I’ve been reading faithfully ever since. Derfner’s new book Gay Haiku (which sprung out of a bunch of his blog posts) launched recently and he’ll be doing a reading/signing event in support of it tomorrow, Thursday May 26 at 7 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble on 22nd and 6th. Here’s a snippet from yesterday’s Gothamist interview:

The actual content of your gay haiku covers a wide range of topics, including your dating life, and even in that short format you are pretty forthright about some bad dates. Are you expecting to get any flak for any of the poems?
Yes, especially because I keep running into the people involved. I’ll get on the subway and there will be the guy with the pet tarantula. He won’t recognize me, but the instant I see him the whole terrible experience comes rushing back. I’m just hoping it’ll be like a Molière play; his audiences laughed hysterically without realizing they were the ones he was savaging. I hope the people involved will laugh without recognizing themselves. Or at the very least that they continue not to recognize me.

The undying popularity of godless things like Celine Dion or Riverdance can be attributed to the Eurovision Song Contest. And yet despite that, it’s safe to say that most Americans probably never knew such a thing existed.

Pitchfork’s David Raposa does a great job of explaining the brilliant shining madness that is Eurovision. Make sure you read all the way down to where he describes this year’s entries. I know they will sound totally insane and fictional, right out of The Onion or McSweeney’s, but let me assure you that a) they are real and that b) the competition is equally bizarre every single year.
Eurovision is so awesome I can’t believe it still isn’t broadcast in the US; in Manila I used to stay up late just to watch it live on obscure European channels. I’d love to go to a bar here in New York and watch it along with my fellow pop lovin’ freaks but since I don’t know anywhere to do that, I guess I’ll just have to try and watch it online, thanks to the BBC.
[ via Do You Feel Loved? ]

Nina Lalli on grilling in New York City:

Humans can be divided into many defining sets: cat people or dog people, beer drinkers or cocktail sippers, those who wear gold or those who wear silver. But in New York, the most gratifying and heartbreaking distinctions tend to be real estate-based. With Memorial Day looming in the near future, New Yorkers know who they are: Those who have outdoor space for a barbecue, and the rest of us (we hate you, by the way).

She’s not kidding, the rest of us really do hate you. Yards are too much work but oh what I wouldn’t do for a proper deck or roof to chill out on on slow afternoons, sipping margaritas while I grill some meat and corn. Gah.

I’m still sort of disbelieving that I’m going to be graduating tonight. Not going to the university-wide one (which suffers from the triple whammy of being gigantic, outdoors and in the morning) but the slightly more intimate Salute that’s just for Tisch students. The largest faction is from ITP, which suits me just fine as we will bring the awesome to Madison Square Garden. Got my cap and gown and am ready to go! It’s been the shortest, most fun three years of my life.
Anyway, if you’re in New York the next two days, you really should drop by the ITP Spring Show and see what everyone’s been working on all semester. I don’t have anything in it as I finished my thesis last semester, but volunteered to take photographs so I’ll be there both days; if I’ve never met you before or you can’t find me on the floor, just ask a student if they’ve seen me around. There are a lot of interesting projects so it’ll be well worth your time to drop by.
Some of the ones I recommend you make sure to see are: Meghan Trainor‘s With Hidden Numbers, Robyn Overstreet’s Data Booth, Emily Conrad’s 2mph, Derek Wang’s boards, John Geraci’s FoundCity (pimped out here previously), Matty Sallin’s Presence Frames, Ian Curry’s Pantopic, Karen Bonna’s SubAlerts and Payphone Warriors by Gregory Trefry, Abraham Burmeister, Kenji Sawai, HyungJung Kim and Ron Shely.
Show hours:
Tuesday, May 10th, 5 to 9 p.m.
Wednesday, May 11th, 5 to 9 p.m.
Directions:
ITP is on the fourth floor of NYU’s Tisch School, 721B Broadway corner Waverly Place. You can take the R train to 8th St and walk south two blocks to Waverly, the 6 to Astor Place and walk west to Broadway, or the C to West 4th and walk east through Washington Square Park to Broadway.

I really liked Butch Dalisay’s most recent column for Newsbreak, Why I Left The Church, triggered by the recent hullaballoo over the Philippine government’s Ligtas Buntis program:

I’m glad, in a way, when the Church speaks and thinks like this, because it reminds me of all the reasons why I left it. Sometimes—usually during one Edsa People Power uprising or other—I’m actually tempted to believe that this Church has come out of the Middle Ages and institutionalized the liberal progressiveness it manifests in other aspects of our national life. And then, just about when I feel like going back to church and genuflecting, I get a dose of what some bishop has to say about birth control, divorce, sexuality, women in the clergy, euthanasia, and censorship, and I feel happy and relieved to be away from all that—well, not exactly, since there’s no way of escaping what we used to call “clerico-fascism” in this country of ours.