Thank Your First Commenter Day
On account of because of the Thanksgiving holiday ("It's just like the first Thanksgiving when the Indians and the Pilgrims sat down to dinner and the Indians taught the Pilgrims what it meant to be hot in the new world!") it is Thank Your First Commenter Day.
So, I'd like to thank Unit 64. Unit 64 is a Los Angeles artist by the name of Matt O'Brien who I have met maybe once or twice. We once worked at the same place but were never in the office at the same time and I always thought he was really artsy and really cool. He has this way of immortalizing the present because he loves the past so much.
I have no clue what happened to his actual comment or the email that led up to it, so I'm going to summarize. A very long time ago I started a blog because I was bored and I thought everyone was doing it. Turns out, now everyone is doing it (see: sidebar). Anyway, back in the year of our Lord 2002 when I started My Life According to Me on Blogger comments were not a feature. Seriously. They didn't automatically come with the blog.
Also, I blogged like six times a year. And my posts were always terribly dramatic and since I had no tracker and no comments I didn't even know if anyone was reading my blog. And I didn't even care! That is true narcissism. Turns out O'Brien was tuning in. Again, I have no idea how he ever even found my blog. So one day he emailed me.
[DRAMATIZATION]
Abigail,
You should get comments on your blog. And don't worry about love, it's not worth being troubled over. It'll find you.
-O'Brien
I must have written something terribly dramatic to encourage an actual email, and in retrospect I'm embarrassed that I was not only troubled about love but that I wrote about it on the internet. Oh, my wounded soul.
But that email prompted me to research comment options (Haloscan!) and this road lead me into design and basic html. I changed my template that day, got the comments feature, and started actually educating myself on the internet at large.
So O'Brien changed my life really. I doubt he ever stops by here anymore (I haven't seen or heard from him in at least a year and I'm too not-cool to comment on his site) and he hardly even updates his own blog.
So thanks, O'Brien, wherever you are. Happy Thanksgiving!