Blog or Journal?

I think I need to make a decision on whether to journal, or to blog. I find the allure of paper hard to resist, and I like having an archival copy of my thoughts, insignificant as they may be, to reflect on in future times. I like seeing the ink on the paper, worn pages, books bursting with my effort. I’ve always struggled with keeping an electronic version of this, since the format of blogging does not match up with my paper record, and I can’t paint on a website. I always meant to print out the pages, to keep them in some hard format, but then isn’t that wasting resources and storage space? How many apartments will I move those boxes to?

So far I have one box of journals in my closet. I think it contains only the writing journals since my move to Boston in 2000. That means that there is a box in my parents’ house containing my formative years, highly productive high school days, when I took up journaling as a mission, and probably part of my turbulent college years, where things turned dark and multimedia expressive.

I would like to find a more expressive blog format, so I might be changing hosts soon after watching fellow bloggers go through this quest.

There are things I want to record and remember that haven’t been written anywhere, just some thoughts.

Just this year:

-Fitting into smaller jeans – a size I never really believed possible, and now I’m looking beyond it to new numbers

-the death of my best friend’s mother

-finding the strength of self preservation, and learning it has a price

-missing my family so much at times it hurts, even at this stage in my adult life. I think this is something I will never lose, and I'm grateful to have that bond

-feeling able to stand on my own financial feet and take the changes as they come
-having so many friends that my social calendar swells and overlaps

Funny, now that I'm thinking I should stop blogging, I've written a bunch of draft posts and have 4 finished items to post too. So for now, conscious duality.