I'll be expecting three separate anniversary cards

Last Sunday was the sixth anniversary of my move to Chicago. Next Monday is my sixth anniversary at my job. I had totally forgotten about both these dates until the little birthday-and-anniversary email went out in our office yesterday.

I never would have thought six years ago when I stood in the street waving goodbye as my parents tooled home in our rented U-Haul and I suddenly realized Holy shit! I just moved to Chicago! that six years later—to the day—I’d be standing on the stage in Millennium Park singing in a citywide Sondheim festival with the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus.

(One reason I never would have thought that is I’d never heard of Millennium Park. Another reason is it hadn’t been built yet, though it had been slated to open in 2000. But I won’t bring any of this up so I don’t undermine the dramatic nature of this post.)

If you made it all the way through my gargantuan post on Monday (and really, who has that kind of time?) you saw some pix of our performance. To save you the trouble of scrolling through the blogging equivalent of the Manhattan phone book in an effort to find and admire them, here’s a reprint of one of the pictures for your convenience. See if you can find me:


But what makes this post REALLY landmarky in an anniversary kind of way is the fact that today is my three-year blogiversary. (Blogaversary? Blog-o-versary? Blirthday?) By the time I found a name that wasn’t already taken and figured out what to say in my first post, I thought I was a bit of a latecomer to the whole blog thing, which I also thought was a fad that would die rather quickly. Of course, I thought the same thing about Madonna and reality TV and camera phones, so what the hell do I know? But a whole bunch of us are still here, blogging away whether we have anything interesting to say or not. And apparently still drawing a regular readership.

I’m not really bringing this up for any reason. I still see blogging as a combination of small, relatively meaningless benefits—cheap therapy, an opportunity to write without editors or clients or legal departments sucking the life out of my ideas, self-indulgent vanity, Dubya bashing, using my well-crafted turns of phrase to capture Nick Lachey’s fancy and inspire him to show up at my door one day in a towel to thank me and we’ll end up living happily ever after—and three years isn’t really a notable milestone anyway. Unless you’re married to Britney Spears. Or Rush Limbaugh. Or Newt Gingrich.

In any case, I wrote a poem to commemorate this anniversary. Please don’t reprint it without permission:

I’ve been writing this blog
For three years now.

And now I wrote this awesome poem
Completely on my own.

Dude.