They say a man with no past has no future. No, wait. A man who does not know history is condemned to repeat it. Yeah, that's it.

When I first put up this new engine to manage my online journal, I quickly perused the titles of my previous entries and assigned many of them categories so that visitors could look at entries by subject and not just have to wade through them chronologically. (Since there are several folks who visit the site to peruse my Clarion West Journal from last year, I desire to keep the customers satisfied. :-)

Anyway, I've started going through my entries more closely and making more thoughtful choices about what categories to use for each one. Some entries will appear in more than one category, which is also requiring a bit of consideration.

This means I've been reading through every entry in my blog in chronological order from, oh, November or so of 2000 to June of last year (so far). It's amazing the patterns you can see when you pull up and look at these high-level synopses (sp?) of what was on your mind that you *can't* see when you're too busy living it.

While it was clear that there were good and bad things about working for my previous employer, for example, it becomes obvious very quickly from my journal entries at the time that I wasn't going to stay there very long.

I've had concrete plans to finish my novel within a month for, oh, about 16 months now. (BTW, my current plan is to send out the first three chapters to my agent of choice in about four weeks. Go figure. More on that soon, I promise!)

I've been whining publicly about how bad I am at returning people's e-mail for over a year now, at least. That hasn't changed.

But, yeah, it's been interesting to tour my public journal and see the face I've been putting on events and observations in my life... and how obvious certain eventualities are when you read the journal, and yet how oblivious I had been while writing it.

I wonder if I should dare to read my private journal, too. Ack!