This Blog Is Impressive.

     Lately, the idea of posting on here has seemed daunting. Too much time has passed, and to be honest, this blog no longer feels like the home it did when I was in high school. In high school, I didn't keep a regular journal like AB and DL. Without realizing it, Papersol became my journal. A journal I wrote in every single day for nearly four years. On August 10th, 2017, with 1,252 posts and song recommendations under my belt, I stopped daily blogging and song recommendations. Since then, my blogging has become increasingly sporadic. Around the time I stopped daily blogging, I started getting more serious about journal writing. I've filled five journals throughout college, which I know is nothing compared to AB and DL's journal collection, but it's a lot for me. I turned to pen and paper because I no longer felt like the Internet was the best place to keep a record of my life. And I still feel that way, which is why I only post on here about four times a year. But I realized I miss having a record of my high school years to look back on. Sure, I kept a journal VERY sporadically during that time, but half a journal covers the span of four years, so you can imagine that it's not a super accurate portrait of my high school years.
     Because I miss having the record of high school that DL and AB have through their journals, I've undertaken the grueling task of compiling every post I ever wrote on here into a Google Doc for safe keeping. Blogger was never the most modern platform for us to be using, and I still fear that one day Papersol will be wiped out. Because of that, I backed up all of our posts to my computer, but the way that the file is stored is not really great for actually reading (it's a file that can be converted or something, and read that way), thus the manual Google Doc entries. I calculated that if I do 50 posts a day, it will take me 25 days to finish the task. And that just gets me up to August 10th, 2017. So probably more like 26 or 27 days. Maybe I'll try to do a 100 a day...
     While I haven't been actively reading my posts (that would take months), from what I've skimmed, it's made me laugh, roll my eyes, question where my brain was at when writing, made me realize how much has changed and how much I've changed in the almost seven years we've kept our lives in this little corner of the universe, and made me so so proud of myself and of us. I blogged every day because I wanted to. Because it was one routine I was good at keeping. And in that small act, I will have literally hundreds of pages of my life recorded. I've only copied and pasted 50 entries, which has somehow translated to 37 11-point font pages on Google Docs. By the end of this, I will have nearly 1,000 pages of entries spanning the course of these seven years. I was always proud of us and of this blog, but because of the way a blog is set up, it was never possible for me to sit back and be in awe of just HOW MUCH we've written in these years. THOUSANDS of pages. I know quantity isn't everything, but it's something.
     And we did all of this before it was a common practice to record every semi-impressive thing you've ever done through a Facebook or Insta post. We weren't doing it because it was trendy (it was definitely not, and it is even more out of fashion now than it was in 2013). We weren't doing it to get views (that idea always made me cringe inside). We weren't doing it to make money (since nobody reads it, that would be impossible anyway). We were doing it for the pure joy of writing, sharing, thinking, building our friendship and a community based on our mutual interests and passions. Most of the things I've done in my life that I'm proud of took a lot of work and a lot of un-fun moments. So to look back and think, wow, this huge accomplishment came about without me even REALIZING it, striving for it, or bragging about it (well, I'm taking a moment to brag now), is very cool to me. I've always wondered how people do 100 mile races or climb Mount Everest. I've never felt that kind of passion or drive for anything. Or so I thought. It's somehow taken seven years, but I see now that my passion is writing. It's the thing I do because I feel strange NOT doing it. It comes so naturally to me that I don't even mention it when people ask what I do for fun. It doesn't seem impressive because unlike running or mountain climbing, it's hard to quantify. But as I sit down and retroactively quantify our writing journey, it's so stinking impressive! And worth celebrating. So cheers to us, cheers to this blog, and cheers to our futures as lifelong writers, in all its different shapes and forms.

-SE Wagner