obloguary

Friends, Random Internet Browsers, People Who Still Check This Blog Occasionally Wondering if I'm Still Alive,

It is with not really that much sadness that I inform you of the passing of ViaGina.

ViaGina was born on Wednesday, March 10th, 2004 while the author sat in front of her four flat-screen computer monitors on a trading floor of JPMorganStanleyGoldmanStearnsBrothers. The job paid the bills, that's for damn sure, but didn't provide her with the level of personal satisfaction she'd attained from exercising 30 hours a week as a member of the college crew team or obsessively studying college admissions statistics in high school. Fortunately, this was before the rampant installation of corporate firewalls to prevent employees from wasting time and money dicking around on the internet, so as soon as her company username and password were set up, she did just that. ViaGina emerged about nine months later.

The initial premise of the blog was to consolidate all the funny and interesting internet-things Gina found during her Monday through Friday 7:45am to 5:00pm with no lunch break website-reading schedule. Of course, it quickly turned into being all about her, as evidenced by Tuesday, March 16th's post about her rosacea diagnosis. (A condition that has since been alleviated thanks to just regular ol' Cetaphil cleanser and not that $50 stinky sulfur crap prescribed by the dermatologist. In case you were wondering.) The blog served as a platform for trying to be funny and sharing way too much personal information with friends, family, and internet strangers. For a solid two and a half years, the blog kept her sane enough to get through almost getting fired from several jobs (key word: ALMOST, though this is really just a technicality because you don't get "fired" from temp jobs and JPMorganStanleyLehmanGoldmanBear basically just asked her to quit), intermittent bouts of unemployment, ill-advised dalliances with boys (Gina's most successful and long-lived relationship during this time period occurred almost entirely over the internet), and lots and lots of drinking.

In late December of 2005, Gina submitted her last electronic time sheet to the temp agency, hinged her entire future on a Craigslist ad for a job at an Italian wine bar, and the blog started to slip away, becoming little more than a memento of a more confusing, but, in retrospect, kind of fun time. It held on for a good year and a half, receiving lackluster and forced updates here and there, and, finally, at 4 pm on Tuesday, August 14th, ViaGina gave up the Good Fight.

Donations in ViaGina's memory will be accepted in the form of visiting my new blog, I Ate the Marshmallow. It will be mostly about food, and the hasty consumption and unskilled preparation thereof. But if you're not that into food, I can assure you that the oversharing of personal information, references to irresponsible life choices, and links to inane things that made ViaGina beloved by literally DOZENS of people will be present in abundance.