"Please God, it won't come to that!"

Late yesterday (and earlier this evening) a friend told me of this nifty little program called Flock. Flock is a modification of Mozilla Firefox, rebuilt specifically for Web 2.0 services. It currently supports a good number of popular Web services, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and LiveJournal. In any case, it's pretty neat and inspired me to finally start using my Blogger account (acquired through Gmail).

This will more than likely be a general, personal Web log for some of the many things that I find online or that run through my head each day. As for myself, I am a college sophomore living in Maryland state, U.S., pursuing an education in the social sciences. I am currently suffering from chronic health complications as a result of long-term Lyme disease. (While there is a lot of controversy around the disease today, it is known to create chronic complications if not treated quickly and, unfortunately, I had the disease for years before being physically diagnosed.)

Both these things are very important to me. School is important because I come from an uneducated lower-lower-class family and am a first-generation college student. My illness is important because it pervades my every activity, every moment of every day, and has for some years. It has effected my strength, speed, balance, memory, ability to eat or think clearly, and my overall mental and emotional state.

You may be able to guess, then, why my blog is titled "A Blog to Remember." It's a reference to the 1958 Titanic film A Night to Remember, based on the 1955 book of the same name. I had no idea what I could possibly name my blog but, after doing a quick search, found this post about blog names. Somewhere amidst reading that post, and seeing that "blog" itself is perhaps the most common word to appear in blog titles, the title came from nowhere. To me its meaning is twofold: it first represents just what a blog does, and what this one will do for me in particular—that is, work to remember the events of my daily life in a concrete form; and second, it refers to the sinking of the Titanic to which, in some ways, my life has felt like a parallel.

If all goes well, I'll try to post here at least once a week. I doubt I could manage daily at this point, but if I can, I will. Now it's time to see if this bout of insomnia can finally end.