This is a closed journal. Please contact me through the comments if you wish to be added.

I was planning to go back through and look at my 1st, 500th, 1000th, and 1500th entries LiveJournal in order to put this one, number 2000, into context. But, after glancing at #1000, I realized that I don't need to look back at the round numbers in the rear-view mirror in order to look forward through the windshield that is this one. 2000 mostly says that I've been here a long time--that's really it. But when I think about this entire journey, more than anything else, I think about where I am in life now versus where I was when I started and I see a person who sees the world in brighter colors. I see a man that has found something that he loves. I see a person who has accomplished almost everything I've wanted to do. I see a novel, two championships, a successful teaching job, and a role where I absolutely do change lives. And I see the faces of the people that I love, the subjects of the story that is my life whom I never want to forget. I belittle myself and insist that I'm the same person I was in high school, the same dumb kid that wrote those first words here about silence. Well, it's a lie. I am absolutely not the same person. I am more, much, much more. And I am proud of myself for it, really. Proud for the man that I am, proud for the life I lead, proud for the people that make my life amazing, and proud for the eight-plus years that I've been here on LJ.

As I have to every time, I thank Cristina Ramirez for introducing me to this place. No matter what it has ended up meaning to anyone else, it has been a huge part of my life. From the small role it played originally to the daily role it now plays--my streak is approaching 1000 consecutive days--part of me is this world of LJ, no matter the population. Thank you also to my readers if you still do exist, but, most of all, thank you LJ for providing me the written residence that no leather or dead trees could provide.

2000 down...why not 2000 more?

Okay, so some of you might have seen a briefly-visible post requesting input from you about changing my username on LJ. You see, I want to continue using LJ a lot and with depth and conviction...but I didn't like the fact that my name remained on it in any iteration. So I decided to change to this. I originally wanted "EntropyRising" because it sounds awesome, but there are tons of people who agree with me--it wasn't available. BUT, when I thought about it, I realized that even though it sounds ridiculously cool, it's a dumb name for my LJ: I'm not trying to increase the entropy (aka disorder) in my life; I'm trying to decrease it and constantly make sense of the things in my world. Thus, I realized as quickly as I had decided to change, that I could go after a better name, and so I did...without giving any of you any input...even though I trust you would have made great suggestions.

So, yes, from now on, I am entropyfalling , an expensive decision for me ($26 total, once I go to LJBook.com and re-donate) but one that I hope will help me carry myself forward in my life and my writing.

[[Forgive my nerdiness: I bet at least one person is thinking, "Entropy wha??!" From my vague memory of Physics and a quick refresher on Google, entropy is a measure of the amount of disorder in a system. When the system is extremely disordered, the entropy is high; when the system is neatly organized, the entropy is low. A great way to imagine it would be to think of two bags of marbles, one bag with just red marbles, the other with only blue. If we take those two bags and dump them into a box and shake them up, what do you expect to see? Probably a mixture of red and blue marbles all over in the box, right? You wouldn't expect all the blue ones to go to one side and the reds to another, right? This is because, upon being shaken, the entropy rises, going from the neatly arranged two separate bags of marbles to one big old mix of colored glass spheres. That is, when originally dumped in, the entropy was low, but after shaking, the entropy became high because everything got mixed up. If that doesn't make sense, or I screwed it up, no worries--just recognize that it sounds fairly cool!]]

There is absolutely nothing of interest about May 31, 2010, outside of my own construction here. The only reason it's even worth mentioning the date is because, on June 1, 2009, I began updating my LiveJournal again after basically ignoring it after taking an internship at.

See, I first stopped writing on LJ when I noticed the collective interest of my "community" of friends had begun dwindling. There were fewer updates than ever and basically everyone had just simultaneously outgrown LiveJournal and, since one of the largest appeals of LJ was always the way it transformed everything written into a discussion, I was ready to completely follow suit. That is, because I didn't think anyone would read what I wrote, I decided I didn't want to write, a decision made even easier when everything got busy and I didn't have time to write.

And then, as my first year of teaching came to a close, I decided that I wanted to come back to LJ. Call it sentimentality, call it boredom, call it pointless--all I know is that on May 31, 2009, I had been updating LJ sporadically if at all...but on June 1, 2009, I had renewed an old habit.

I don't think that I really had any goals at the beginning and, looking backward, I can't really summarize what I ended up with. I have a narrative about my first full, official year of teaching, highlighting many of the highs and lows. I have a photo album reminding me of some of the amazing individuals I met and worked with this year. I spent these past 365 days experiencing a few million ideas and stories and anecdotes and relationships and poems and disappointments and so much more, all of which meant the world to me when they happened, and now (assuming I can hold onto the PDF of my journal) I will never be able to forget about any of it.

This entire experience has been, largely, an individual experience. After all, unlike when I first began on LJ, I wrote this past year for myself to chronicle everything of my life. Still, nobody writes without having an audience in mind, and I know that my writing was always written toward my closest friends, Matt, Lexi, Sam, Eunice, Shannon, Cristina, the same ones that, although most of them have moved away from LJ, brought me here in the first place. Even though I only heard from some of you, it was till you that I left my entries open to, because often knowing that you might read my words and trusting you with them was as validating as actually having them read. In addition, this entire frivolous goal of mine (to go an entire year updating every day) was a very private goal, mentioned only here...and to one other person. And, though she made fun of me for writing in my "diary," the truth is, I wouldn't have had much to write about if not for her and the rest of my students, the vast majority of whom made me content going to work every day.

It's funny because, after spending the year writing for my own internal audience and memory, I don't really remember how to write for other people. Still, even as I know that making this one short post public isn't going to do anything because nobody reads the stuff here (since it's all protected), I feel compelled to end with general advice for the general population. Although this one year thing isn't that much of an accomplishment, this past year proves to me that people are capable of pushing themselves to do things. In November, I decided to write a novel for NaNoWriMo, and one month later, I had a novel. As crappy as that novel is, the truth is I never would have expected myself to open an envelope containing a professional copy of something I created, no matter how much I wanted it. But, by simply pushing myself a little bit and keeping at it each day of November, I ended up accomplishing something I always wanted to do.

And, of course, I made a special effort to come here each day from June 1, 2009, through May 31, 2010, and write something. It wasn't always extensive, it wasn't always valuable, it wasn't always coherent, but, one year later, I have something that I will treasure for the rest of my life: a chronicle of self, a little like those YouTube photo montages where people take pictures of themselves every day for a year and then put them all together.

This past year has been my collage: a work of words, of photos, and of memories.

See you tomorrow.

"have you ever noticed that silence does not really exist? when you sit in a "silent" room, there forever remains a sound that serves as just that, the absence of sound."

Those were the first words I wrote on LiveJournal a little more than six years ago. I think, if I look just at style, I've obviously come a long way since those days, when I confused unconventional structure with a unconventional style. I didn't capitalize things, I ignored apostrophes, I mixed languages, I ommitted paragraph breaks. I fancied myself a budding ee cummings, not as a future poet, but as a future captain of grammar-free writing.

Of course, back then, I also wasn't writing with an audience in mind. I didn't see LiveJournal as an interactive place, but simply a journal that I couldn't tear pages out of when I decided I didn't feel that way anymore. I didn't think that one day I would actually develop friendships through this strange "community" that developed, that I would share so much of my thoughts and ideas on here, or that I would one day get excited and anxious about trying to write a 1000th entry here, even as I readily admitted that I'm writing more for my own entertainment now than anything else?

I took suggestions for what to write here, and I think the best one was to not make it anything--just treat it like normal. But, of course, as soon as I decided to do exactly that, I began hoping for some sort of a drama to occur, suddenly negating the idea of just treating it like any other day. I suppose that means I had already decided that I wanted this to be an event, which is really stupid because that was simultaneously what I had decided was what I didn't want.

Still, I'm not going to make this long, because there's nothing of interest to talk about. At the same time, I am going to say that I think I've been taking this journal a different direction during this streak I'm on. By updating each and every day--and intentionally making the effort to do so--I've made more efforts to structure my thoughts. I've been experimenting with formats by Live-Blogging the NBA Draft and some of the World Cup of Softball and introducing the bullets, I've been posting more photographs to let images save me a few thousand words, I've been writing retrospective essays about tiny topics, and I've truly made an effort not to force anything. In a sense, I've stopped elevating this into something it's not; I've actually begun documenting my life. I am a teacher and a baseball coach, in addition to the emotional sort of person I am, but only recently did I begin to let this journal reflect that fact. As I've worked to fill every day this summer with something, I've slowly discovered that it's actually just as much fun to write about a baseball game or a particular lesson as it is to write about being heartbroken or lonely.

A few years ago, I made it a goal to begin writing a public, "secular" blog in the mold of Keith Law's The Dish. I failed miserably, ending up with a few odd entries about books, movies, sports, and soft drinks. I didn't enjoy it. It wasn't in my style, whatever that style was. Yet, now, finally, I think that I've found my groove in writing about everything that I enjoy and deem important. I know that I actually look forward to writing now, and, if there's something that excites me about 1000 entries, it's that I actually feel optimistic that I can write 1000 more.

Although I wanted to be a teacher when I grew up (and now am), I also always wanted to be a writer. I won a contest in fifth grade for a short story I wrote, and I wrote a ton of Goosebumps-esque stories back then. I enjoyed writing essays and poems all through high school, and actually, after a break, enjoyed toying with essay conventions in college, too. Now, though I'm not writing short stories or poems anymore, I still feel like I'm playing with words and enjoying the process of transforming life into text. That encourages me to keep it up, because I remember Dr. Zehnder saying that it's those that enjoy using words that succeed as writers. I'm enjoying trying to tell my story in words, transforming perceptions and thoughts into words. And, although I doubt this hobby ever turns into any "real" writing or not, I've enjoyed and valued the ride so far, and I look forward to continuing it onward.

[[Of course, I really hope that I have something exciting to write about, too!]]