Waxing Barley Moon
I've been looking at my old domains from about 2005-2012 on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and I am honestly surprised at how little about me has changed from 20 to 40, even if the years in between were quite a bit different.
One of the funniest similarities is just that the first domain was called 'Waxing-Moon' and I hadn't been thinking of that at all when I decided to start updating this blog on the new and full moons. I wouldn't have even considered the moon an interest of mine, though I recall the idea of 'becoming' or 'reaching fullness' was the theme of that blog, just as it is in this one. Apparently I really like the moon. I even had a fanlisting subdomain called 'Over the Moon.'
It's unfortunate that the layouts are all lost to time because I had been using Livejournal as the host, but the blast from the past combined with seeing some retro layouts, cliques, and webrings on Bear and Neocities has inspired me to try my hand at making something 20-year-old me would have liked as home to a witchy cooking webzine I'm working on.
Only a few blog posts and bio blurbs from 'Waxing-Moon' are available, but I found that almost every thing I loved or wanted to share about myself then is not terribly different from today. I talked about cats and coffee and Gilmore Girls, The Sims and reproductive rights and baking. I talked a lot about paganism, which I've only recently started thinking about again after years of atheism. I had strong opinions about vegetarianism, which I would like to try to get back to again after depression, social friction, and restaurant-worker-freeganism turned me back into an omnivore.
I also found an awful lot of self-descriptions and frustrated rants that look a little different (and very blatant) in today's understanding of neurodivergency. So much so that my next domain was 'Socially-Awkward' which is a quite frankly sad follow-up to the idea of 'becoming' and unfortunately how I spent many of the years between then and now.
Then a baking blog ('CookieLynn') after finishing pastry school. Then a retreat from websites all together as social media and influencer culture took off and made it nearly impossible to enjoy in the same way.
I don't really know what the point of this wandering was, but I do know it took 13 days AFTER I had decided on skipping the New Barley Moon (despite it being at the other other funny number 13:37 that day) because the Waxing Moon title was very on-theme, to actually get around to writing what is essentially 'I don't know, here are some thoughts' so obviously I have been struggling with the idea of feeling earnest at 41. I will probably backdate this to the first quarter moon, and cover it with a Full Barley Moon post on Friday.