500 Posts and Counting!

Dear Reader,

This is my 500^th post on CuriousWordsBlog.com!

That is all.

Love,

Raven

Kidding! But wow! 500 posts — what a journey it has been!

For those of you who don’t know, CuriousWordsBlog.com was born out of a personal challenge, simply — publish one blog post every day for 365 days. At first, this whole blogging thing was awkward for me, and I didn’t have any idea about what to say (see post #2 for example —oh boy…more here), however, as time went on, I realized that, well, I simply have A LOT to say and this blog is an adequate place to say it.

Although I only became a blogger somewhat recently, at earlier points in my life, I was a recorder of my personal information. Not too long ago when I took a trip to visit family (more here), I re-discovered the journals I used to keep starting from my college years. However, these little notebooks did not contain the sorts of letters that I publish nowadays. In fact, many of the written lines were not even full sentences, rather, just lists, chronicling the events of my (rather unremarkable) days.

Another journal that I kept way back when was just a list of quotes, which is a little story in and of itself….

In an attempt to preserve the magic of my freshman year of college, I endeavored to keep a journal. I took the campus shuttle to the local Wal-Mart and purchased a small spiral notebook. Not knowing what to write, I jotted down a lyric from a song by the band “fun.” that I was interested in at the time. Then, overnight, I decided that my little book would become a quote book. Secretly, whenever someone close to me would say something that made laugh or would bring a smile to my face, I would record the quote in the book and attribute their name to it. I got into the habit of doing this especially when my close group of girl friends got together. However, I must have slipped one time and made my quote-taking ways obvious as one of the girls turned to me and said “…did you just write that down?” Embarrassed, I admitted to them my quote book idea and they loved it (eventually). It even became a running joke that whenever someone said something funny, someone would say “that’s quote book worthy” or “that’s definitely going into the quote book!”

I documented quotes for the whole of my freshman year and then stopped when we moved out of the dorms in May. The group of friends that I had grown so close to would move onto different residence halls and sorority houses next fall and our adventures would never quite be the same. But flashforward to the end of my senior year, I still had the freshman year quote book preserved in a special place. I typed up the best quotes, dated them, and then printed them at a local shop.

Paying a little extra for a nice binding and a plastic cover, I was excited to receive a neat stake of quote books filled with inside jokes from our days as naive freshwomen. Then, in the days before graduation and our parting from our campus home, we went out for brunch one final time. Over mimosas, eggs, and sweet treats, I passed out the forgotten quote books to the friends who had made its pages come to life. Their shock and surprise at this gesture was reminiscent of their original reaction to my announcement that I was compiling a quote book years ago.

Although the quote book holds no more than conversational fragments, witty remarks, crude jokes and dated references, the words tell their own story for those who helped make it happen.

Even if you’re not a writer, dear Reader, I encourage you to write things down. Whether it be only quotes or lists, it is amazing how much pleasure you can find in your recollections of another time no longer accessible to you.

So, I wish Curious Words Blog a happy 500 posts (and counting!). Even if what I say is repetitive, uninteresting, and filled with grammatical errors— I’m so grateful to my past-self for taking the time to write things down regardless. It’s a good feeling and I hope that you can share in it yourself one day too.

Wishing you 500+ beautiful moments.

Love,

Raven