On the good thing about e-journals
I was thinking a bit the other day about what, if any, are the differences between this kind of journaling, and the traditional kind done with (a really nice) pen, (really nice) paper, and binding.
It comes down to this - if I had begun Livejournaling in 1994 (back when the internets was only Netscape, and I was deathly afraid to click a link), would I have typed on screen more or less what I wrote in my journal? Or diary - I suppose if Pepys could keep one, so could I.
Hard to say. I wrote about the worst thing I've experienced in my life (most of it, anyway) on Livejournal. In the ~5 years (1993-1998) that I kept a pretty darn continuous diary, I had nothing approach in magnitude what I experienced between June and September of last year. The only thing that came close was having to euthanize our dog of 14 1/2 years. And that didn't really come too close. Those were Halcyon days, pretty much...with the exception of feeling like I was going to toss my thesis in the trash can. Mostly, I wrote about normal stuff, good things I experienced, stuff I read and watched, and particularly about girlz (or lack thereof) - I especially enjoyed putting those monologues to paper when I was shit-faced :-)
So, I was looking through some stuff today - and then it struck me, why I do this in this manner.
We all do this because of some egocentric impulse - we think these thoughts are worth preserving (and, from our own perspective, they most certainly are), so we do so. A little Ayn Rand never hurt.
The trouble is, looking back on my own analog efforts in this arena, I can hardly decipher my own thoughts anymore, viz;
and that was when I was sober.