Happy Anniversary, Blog!

It's the five-year, 30-day anniversary of the blog! In celebration, I'll commence with a third-grade writing assignment that I helped facilitate at Jackson's school today. The kids are learning to use adjectives in their writing, especially focusing on their five senses to describe the winter season. I'll alter the assignment to reflect my feelings about Captive Wild Woman, the blog, on this wintry day. I will highlight the adjectives in hopes of improving my writing--the goal of the blog, by the way, was to improve my writing. And to get the attention I crave.

Hearing: I remember the first day I figured out how to embed a music video in a post. I copied another blog's bizarre javascript code and used that with YouTube videos for half a year before realizing I just had to click the "embed" button on the video page to get the proper copy-&-paste code. I never said I was brilliant. Still, that first day was an exciting one for my ears, because now, despite copyright infringement issues, I can listen to almost every awesome and horrible song I've ever heard in my entire life, and post it here for your ears as well. What power! It's like being a DJ but with home-style snacks and fresh air. Plus fuzzy slippers. This is a music geek's dream, to hear anything at all at any time and to relish the aural possibilities of commenting on it for others to experience. I have an elaborate system of embedding streaming music as well, but it involves a Tumblr site and more weird-ass code and patience, and I won't go into it here. Still, I can stream music, man!

Sight: I think it's obvious that blogs are some of the ultimate visual mediums of our time. Despite creeping irrelevance in the wake of Facebook and whatever the future holds in today's ethereal Internet realm, blogs continue to putter forth as long as there's an abundance of obsessive attention-starved oddballs who need to express themselves by posting videos of Sailor Moon theme songs from Season 4 and dogs jumping on trampolines. Any publishing tool that can easily line up jpegs, animated gifs, videos (both home-made and public), plus comics, photos, art work and so on, will be around for us to cherish and comment on, thanks to the forward-thinking Blogger founders and our benevolent corporate overlord, Google. (*waving obsequiously* "Hellooo Google! Thank you!")

Touch: You can't touch a blog. (Fail!) But a blog can touch you (whoo). Seriously, sometimes people start blogs to get through really difficult times in their lives or to deal with life-altering events, such as chronic illness, severe writer's block, or civil rights. The ability to get your message "out there" quickly and for so little cost (once you're plunked in front of an Internet-ready computer), is essential. There's also a lot of pop-culture garbage to wade through. I like well-written garbage, don't you?

Smell: If you spend too much time on the computer and don't take care of personal hygiene issues, you will smell. So get up and walk around once in a while, and make it over to the shower while you're at it. I'll try and do the same.

Taste: Computers taste terrible, but here's a nostalgic food blog of questionable taste to whet your appetite.

Consequently, one of my first posts was about God, or the lack thereof. Aim high! I always say. To be honest, I think my very first post was about "John & Kate Plus 8" but I accidentally deleted it when I was fooling around with the buttons on the blog dashboard. And so ends our anniversary reflection.