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Good times and bum times
I have been keeping a journal on the internet for five years. The archives are gone, of course - although I'm bringing some of them back slowly. I'll be ripping off the idea that several journals have ripped off from Beth and linking a couple from the bottom of every new entry, starting today. The missing archives - some of them - will be back. I'll be removing every mention of the former names of this journal to make it hard to Google, but the entries will remain unaltered. I've been reading my archives this week, this anniversary week. I can say without a trace of regret that not a word of 1998 will be going back up. It's not just that the writing was atrocious - and oh, it was; how have some of you been around since then? - but that the story was atrocious. We really don't need to relive the dysfunction that was my entire relationship with Michael. I mean, yeah, it's easy to read back through the entries and see what a complete idiot I was, but do we really need to? We do not. And therefore, we will not! It is really, really hard to believe that I have been doing this for so long now. I know there are people out there who have been doing it longer, but five years? That's a big chunk of my life. I certainly didn't start out thinking I'd still be doing this all these entries later. I certainly didn't think that some of the most important people in my life would come into it because of this journal. I've had five fairly uneventful years in the journaling community (which I don't think exists anymore, not the way it used to). I've won a couple of Diarist Awards, I've been to JournalCon (and am going again this October), I did a round of the Crit List. I used to be a member of Diary-L (is there still a Diary-L?) until the nastiness made my eyeballs bleed. I've sort of hovered around the middle-of-the-road category of journalers. I've never become a Kymm or a Pamie or a Beth or a Rob, those journals that everyone (including myself) reads. But I've developed a smaller community here amongst all of you who read. I don't know that I would want to be one of the journalers with the readers numbering in 500 and up - I think that brings with it a whole new set of headaches, not the least of which is nasty email on occasion. I am surprised and grateful that so many have made it six, seven years, because reading their journals has become a part of my life that I am not ready to give up and some of them have become dear friends. It's an interesting phenomenon, this journal thing. I've always said I would do it until I was tired of it. I'm not tired of it yet. I go through periods when I've had enough, sure, but something always pulls me back here. It's not a love of exhibitionism; I certainly don't tell the sorts of things here that I did back in those horrid days of 1998 (and some of 1999). I guess it's still a love of the story, of telling the story, and what sharing the story has given back to me. I feel connected to this website, to this genre, in a way I don't feel connected to anything else. (Not to say that I don't feel connected to other things; that certainly isn't true.) So I've been here for awhile, and I'm still here. I don't plan on changing that anytime soon. There are still things to say and things to learn, and as long as that's true, I plan to be around. As always, I'm glad you've stuck with me this long. back | next
26 August 2000
In which I finally meet "Dora", as she was still known back then. 27 August 2000 26 August 2002
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