An Honest Answer For All of Them

Earlier this month, I was browsing I, Musical Genius, as I sometimes do when I'm bored. While looking at the index on the right side of the screen, I noticed the "2009" near the bottom and realized the 10th anniversary of this blog had come and passed earlier this year without me recognizing it.

Happy 10th birthday I, Musical Genius!

This is already the most navel gazing-est of all websites, but you'll have to allow me revel in it in this case. It's a big occasion!

Even though there are posts labelled as being from 2008 on this site, those are actually from before this blog started. I used to post blogs on MySpace (dating myself badly on that one), and I imported those when I started IMU because I thought they were good longform pieces and I wanted to flesh out the content a bit and give people something to check out when they came. That's very funny in hindsight, because boy oh boy was I very bad at writing and editing at that time.

I started IMU on March 8th, 2009 for a couple of reasons. As I said, I used to post blogs on Myspace, but people were moving away from that platform and there wasn't nearly the same level of engagement. I sometimes posted blogs on Facebook, but most people on that site focused on simpler social interaction. Realistically, most important factor was that I had gotten dumped for the first time in January of that year and I was having a difficult time coming to terms with that.

A fewer of my newer punk friends had blogspots, so I decided to shift over here and start this site as a new project for myself. Being the sheltered suburban teen that I was, getting dumped seemed like the hardest thing in the world to go through at the time and that difficulty was bleeding into other areas of my life. I was struggling at pretty much everything and had a subterranean sense of self-worth. Of course, given that I was emotionally fragile and loved ska, the name had to come from an ASOB deep cut. I hoped that through starting the blog, I could channel all the things I was feeling into something that was creative in some way.

I think that comes across in the early posts of this blog. They are truly bad and embarrassing, and many of them are just me talking about how important cheesy pop-punk breakup songs are to me. That's okay though! The site served its purpose!

I hesitate to say something like "IMU saved me!" because that's dumb and saccharine and not true. I think what's closer to the case is that IMU  has always been a reflection of my life at the time. This is why I've never deleted any of the cringey posts from the beginning of the site (or the cringey posts from much later as well). I don't think it's bad to acknowledge who you used to be and look back at how you've changed. If anything, you should be glad that you've changed over a decade, because if you haven't, you for sure suck ass.

As I matured and learned more about myself, who I was a person and what that meant, that started to come through in the posts. Gradually I moved away from short sentences accompanying videos to longer entries with a central idea. I definitely got much better at writing and developed a voice somewhere along the way.

I used to hope that my audience would keep growing and that I'd have this big community around the blog. Not so much that I could monetize it or anything like that, but so I could interact with people who read it and talk about stuff. I hoped that people would drop into the comments and dialogues would start. I guess I've always been sort of desperate for that sort online community, but I never made much of an effort or did a good job in fostering that around IMU.

That's okay though. At this point, IMU is basically just for me. And Matt and Rebecca. And you random lurkers, who I know come here sometimes.

How I've thought of this blog has changed a lot over its existence. I feel like I used to think of it as a music site, where people could discover new stuff thanks to my ~excellent taste~ (this meant generic pop-punk bands from Florida). Shockingly, that did not take off. These days, I like to think of it as an online zine. Most people probably find it closer to a diary. I guess it's somewhere in between those two things.

It's hard to explain why, but I'm extremely proud of I, Musical Genius. I think a huge part of it is that it's something I've stuck to for more than a decade. Many friends have started online projects that they're "throwing themselves fully into" and then given up shortly thereafter. That's totally okay, as keeping up with personal projects while having to navigate your life and your job or school or anything else is hard, but that's exactly why I'm proud. This site is just writing. There's no filler that's just me re-posting photos that someone else took or sharing a meme with no comment. I've sat down and written things that I'm thinking for ten years and inside of me, that feels commendable.

Maybe Blogger will get deleted one day. If and when that happens, I don't know what I'll do. But for the moment, IMU is still here and is more less a digital reflection of my existence and everything I've done.

In the early days of this blog, I used to end every post with lyrics from a song that I thought captured the ethos of the entry and I remember one of those quotes coming from "Faction" by Less Than Jake, the last song on Borders and Boundaries. In wrapping up a toasting of this project, there wouldn't be anything more appropriate than to end with an introspective pop-punk song about sticking to your ideals from the band who stuck with me so closely along the way.

Strike a match folks.