sure, why not it's been awhile.

Today I started playing around with building a neocities page and being a front end dev I needed to be inspired to create something "bad". What better way to do that the to hit up the wayback machine and look up my old sites. Naturally this lead down a rabbit hole of old links to my livejournal and myspace and a hell of a lot of cringe and sadness that followed.

But in a way it was sad. The posts were naturally embarrassing, friends comments equally so, and the back and f forth flirting with my girlfriend at the time was ooof rough. The sad part was the hope associated with all these posts via myself and my friends at the time. Just so much hope that looking back at 2004, 20 years ago, I just wanted to somehow gain access to a time machine or something and say "it's not all gravy!".

I should have just left it at looking at the bands I was listening to at the time and downloading their stuff again, I should have just left it at that. But of course I didn't and started making attempts to look people up. Don't do that.

some where dead, ex girlfriend who I thought would be the love of my life forever is now married to what seems like a great guy, others got hard into drugs, alcohol, etc. Life flew by. A good friends kid who I remember as being a 3 year old funny little girl is now a 23 year old intelligent and successful woman.

It's funny I teared up reading my ex's posts on my old myspace wall and then finding her facebook today 20 years after those posts. But we weren't good for each other in hindsight. I wasn't emotionally available and she had trust issues. She cheated on me several times and I just accepted it because I didn't want to lose her. If that time machine had presented itself today I probably would have gone back and told my 20 year old self "dude, just let her go you'll both be happier a lot sooner" But you know the past is the past for a reason.

I read the posts and livejournals that were available and unfortunately the snapshots saved were from what I would consider my favorite period of time. I wish snapshots were saved from maybe a year earlier. It was a point in my life where I just didn't know what I was doing and it read like I was just heading in multiple directions trying to figure things out on my own. This was evident by reading about constantly moving from different apartments, different cities, etc just to try and find that one. also constantly changing jobs or switching back and forth from freelancing to regular employment.

so am I happy with how things turned out? I don't think so, not yet. Reading those old pages made me wish I had changed a few things. treated people differently. focused a lot more. try not to make certain relationships work that were never going to work. avoid certain situations and embrace others. But like I said the past is the past for a reason.

I think it can be good to look at your old internet presence, but leave those friends and those emotions you had then where you left them. Trying to bring them back today can hurt more.