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Everything2 reminded me how cool my life is

My life is a pretty cool thing to live through. Don't feel left out; yours probably is, too. It's really easy to forget that, though, because you're too busy living to really pay attention to it. You fall into a routine, just doing things as they happen, and even the weird things lose their lustre; nothing really breaks your tempo.

But your life is probably cool. I'd forgotten that mine is, but I've just been reminded of it.

Over the past month, I've been participating in Iron Noder. I'm not actually reaching the goal, making my attempt a glorious failure. The glory, of course, is that I'm writing again. "Getting back into everything2" had been on my to-do list for over two years, a hiatus longer than the active time of my account. It never got done out of pure laziness; I had a queue of things I wanted to write, but I never had a push to do it, so I never did. Video games were easier, anyway.

Then along comes NaNoWriMo, and a small smattering of people pressuring me to participate; I've neve been able to write fiction longer than a few short stories, so trying to do a novel was right out. But maybe I could aim for thirty Everything2 nodes in a month? I stumbled very quickly across Iron Noder, and decided to give it a try, representing my push back into writing.

Well, by the quantity of nodes I've added writeups to this month, it evidently worked as giving me that push. Even though the Challenge itself is over, I intend to keep writing. My queue of things to write grew; I added things much faster than I could remove them. Sometimes, one writeup would inspire me to create more; more often, something in life would inspire me towards something I should write up. Highlights from work, elements of musical performances, falling off my bicycle, all of these things have been added to my queue- and some have already been written about.

That constant search for new material is the true value of Everything2. It is why Everything2 kicks Wikipedia's ass. Whenever something interesting in my life happens, I can't just let it drift by- I pay rapt attention, taking notes, placing myself to fully experience my life- originally, just so I could write it up later, to share and to express and to give me something interesting to compose, but now it's already become a habit- I'm paying attention to everything, and learning quickly that there's a lot of interesting stuff to say and do.

It's not just me. From the reputation score on my write-ups, apparently other people think my life is cool too. I write about the daily or weekly normal stuff that happens in my life, my perspective on it and how it affects me, and people get interested. I make random notes about slightly weird experiences and I get a plethora of messages about it, discussing it, finding people with their own takes and opinions on similar experiences- and I feel like part of the world, an individual worthy of note simply because my experience is unique. So is everybody else's. That's why I like to read Everything2, after all.

Many people with blogs have observed the same phenomenon, the "I'm so blogging this" experience. I have a LiveJournal, but it's never done as much for me, even when I've tried (and failed) similar post-per-day challenges. As a day-to-day chronicle of my life, I note events, and the occasional stray thought; I don't go on into detail about the normal aspects and infodebris in my life for paragraphs on end. A blog makes me wish for flashy and wild experiences to tell epic stories about. That's great, too, but it's not the same as learning- or being reminded- that there's an epic story in just about everything I do, and when I don't screw it up, it's worth reading. Everybody else's is, after all, so why shouldn't mine be?

Everything2 put me in the noder mindset, and it reminded me that my life is full of awesome. Try it. Yours is too.