8/30/97

This morning felt good outside. Dew was still on the grass, and the air was slightly cool. There was that early-morning-kind-of-softness to the light, and the combination of all those aspects produced a kind of quietude...I could almost forget the polluted air and traffic for a while (not that the air is too bad where my apartment is but around campus I think it's awful). Too bad early morning is so early... :) or maybe I'd experience this more often.

9/1/97

I've kept a journal on and off for a few years: mostly off, as I'd write an entry and then not write another for months. I mainly wrote when I felt like I had a problem to sort out.

After reading a few online journals, I got motivated to pick up my blank book again. I wrote down some everyday things, memories, lists, etc. Somehow writing about myself in a blank book seems so self-conscious: it just feels so arrogant and self-centered, although I know that it's not, that lots of people keep journals. Somehow just seeing my words in my own handwriting feels too close to the bone -- I want to keep a journal but I want to feel some distance there too. That probably doesn't make sense, and I'm not sure I know how to explain it. I don't think I could ever write anything extremely personal in a journal anyways: I always fear that someone would find it. Not that most people close to me would likely find any "big secrets" in it that they didn't already know. But sharing a confidence with someone is different than them reading your own words -- you can't explain every nuance on paper, and written words can seem so bare and vulnerable.

So why put a journal on the web so that anyone can read it? Seeing my words in typeface gives them a bit of a distance for me: it's not like seeing my own handwriting. Why not just write on the computer then [after all, that's what Doogie did (by the way, what an embarrassing name)]? With web pages I can add graphics that I couldn't in word processing, and everything can link together so well with HTML, which I think is kind of fun: I do all mine on notepad by hand. It's kind of an adult version of secret codes, which I loved as a kid. I don't pretend that's all though: deep down there's that urge to assert an existence, even if on a small scale.

"Writers live their lives twice," I once read in an essay on writing. I think this is especially true for journal-keepers. For me, keeping a journal not only gives me a creative outlet, but helps me be reflective, something which often gets put aside in days of rushing here and there.

I do think people write differently, myself included, on the computer than on paper. Regardless, though, journaling, whether online or on paper, gives a record of all those days that otherwise blur together. Without some type of record, our individual ordinary days are forgotten. And those are the days we have the most of and can sometimes turn out to be less boring or uneventful than we thought.

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