The state of the journal

[susandennis]

This may be a fine line but I don't really consider this a blog. I think of this as an old fashioned What Did I Do Today, What Do I think About Stuff journal. Not in a scribbled scrawl on a page but in a digital version.

Long ago I used to keep hand written journals. I found it was a good way to organize my thoughts and figure them out. No one every saw them but me until one day... a guy I was seeing came to me and told me he had read them. He told me because he wanted to take issue with some of the things I had written.

Yeah, yeah, I took out the big eraser to that relationship BUT, I also quit writing in journals. Until I found Live Journal.

I truly love and appreciate and am so very grateful for all of the wonderful feedback and comments I get. Funny how one reader shut me down years ago and now I crave readers. Ha!

I got a new one last night. nan58 found me while 'thumbing' through the directory and I'm delighted. She left a comment and I followed her links and discovered that she lives in exactly the same town where my brother has his shop!! Turns out she works very close to it. How cool is that?????!!

On a day to day basis, I do not interact with many people at all. I can usually count the number on one hand. But, through the magic that is this journal, I can wallow in the crowds and no one cares if I have a coffee stain on my shirt. It's wonderful. Thank you.

p.s. The original journal reading dude later married my boss (after he divorced his wife - yeah, our relationship sucked in many ways). He contacted me about five or so years ago and then quickly added me to his email list on all kinds of political crap. I sent him my "please don't send me spam" email and got a tirade back about how his insights weren't spam. What a prince. Happily, I have not heard from him since.

Comments

[aellia.livejournal.com]

Maybe the prince turned into a frog!
I love you and your journal :-)
xx

[susandennis]

You know that I totally return the favor. I had fun blowing bubbles with Ruby yesterday!

[aellia.livejournal.com]

Can you believe I saw you smile when you read that ! I did.
The bubbles were courtesy of a new battery operated gadget...I'm too out of puff to keep blowing them
xx

Lucky Me

[ex-nan58.livejournal.com]

I feel really fortunate to have found your journal!

I too had an issue with my paper journals that at one time made me do a quick retreat about sharing my feelings.

I keep some things private still but thankfully I didnt totally give up writing because of the incident. I think my writing is what keeps me sane.

web log

[machupicchu.livejournal.com]

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I agree that it's a fine line, although in more recent years on occasion I have referred to my journal as a "blog," usually just because "blog" has become such a commonplace term.

I still prefer to use the word "journal," though, in my case particularly considering how profusely I write. Although it could be argued that my journal is indeed a log of every event, no matter how large or small, and even just about every thought I experience (there's literally nothing I hide), that's generally not how it's presented. I write it like a journal, the same way I also wrote hand written journals for many years before LiveJournal brought me back to it.

For me, I love the accounting aspect of it, even if it is in journal form, largely because of my otherwise terrible memory. I have a written account of everything in my life in hand written journals from 1990 to 1996 (and spotty journal entries from 1987 to 1989). I lost interest after that because I had a record of everything in the letters I was writing everyone, which also read largely as journals. Then my work in 1999-2001 left me with no time for it, so in terms of a written account, there's kind of a two-year gap there.

But then the clouds parted, the chorus sang, and LiveJournal presented itself to me. And given what can be done with it, the very name makes much more sense to me than if they had called it, for instance, LiveBlog. It seems to me that this site is designed specifically for journals, rather than blogs, necessarily.
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[kyrielle]

Yep. There are blogs on LJ, I imagine, and journals on sites more prone to "blogging". But what I'm keeping is a journal. It lacks the links, fact-checking, interconnectedness, and topic-focus that I normally associate with a "blog" and instead is exactly the sort of random bits I would put in a paper journal, except pared down to what I want the world to read.

And it's lovely to have readers for the stuff I choose to share. And that's worlds different from the guy who invaded your privacy, read your private notes/thoughts without your permission, and then thought he had any right to comment on them whatsoever when, in fact, he had no right to even be reading them. What an ass!

[sea-weed.livejournal.com]

I love your journal too, every bit of it, the gym updates, those gorgeous knitted bears, the cats, your sense of humour, the tree updates etc... and I can never see a bosu at the gym without thinking of blue soup. :-) Thank you for sharing!

[susandennis]

what lovely things for you to say. that just makes my day. thank you!

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

That's quite a nice commentary. My only journal for years was my e-mail sent-items file or folder. When a computer burped and lost such a file or folder, a piece of my journal disappeared. For a while before e-mail, I kept copies of paper mail letters I sent. Before that, I'm dependent on my memories.

Your exercise journals inspired my own. Mine came in handy when I had to sort out how many training appointments I had paid for, and how many we had used. Often I've had other journal entries come in handy for figuring out something important that I had forgotten, but that's the best recent example.