Two, At Once!

[copied from dland]

As Bullwinkle said. Wanna see me pull a rabbit out of my hat?

Two entries on the same night. The first one, whiny. There's really no other way to say it, no excuses. Whiny whiny whiny.

Now, more than anything, intrigued. As Mr. Spock would say. Really, if I hadn't been raised a television junkie in the 1950s, I'd never have anything to say to anyone.

After my first entry, about an hour and a half ago, I thought I would spend some time reading other people's diaries, or blogs, or whatever they should be called. Here is what I learned:

1. Some people are really really good at this.

2. I am not so very good at this. I'm working on it.

These seem to be the two essential truths. So I checked to see where they got their guestbooks and counters and all those neat little tricks, and I added a guestbook and a counter to my diary and now it looks so cool.

I guess now I should really work on the writing.

I like to write and I have always written. My earliest efforts at communicating with a mass audience and in written form were when I scribbled with crayons in my mother's hardcover Norman Mailer novels. I thought that if I wrote in the book -- literally -- I would be a writer, I would be writing a book.

Fast forward. For a very long time I thought that being a writer had to mean that there were people somewhere reading what I wrote. So when I wrote stories or novels or whatever, and the only people who read them were my husband and my sister, I was pleased with what I wrote, but felt I hadn't quite gotten it.

So about twelve years ago -- hmm, is that when that pesky old brain tumor started growing? -- I decided to write for myself. No reason, except that I wasn't exactly pulling in an audience, and I guess I had to write. I convinced myself that I was just writing everything down (by then, typing everything in) so that I wouldn't forget it all. Remember, somebody was about to drill a hole in my skull and expose my soft little brain to the open air, just to pull out that little lump of annoying nerve tissue, and it occurred to me that maybe I wouldn't remember my stories at all. This way, I guess, I could have read them as if they were new, the same way I would have had to re-read Shakespeare and Steinbeck. Anyway, happy ending, only the tumor got pulled out (along with all the hearing in my right ear), and I did tend to wobble around a bit and walk into walls for a few years, but all in all, thinking and memory remains in ... in ... intact, that's it.

So I've been writing for me, to save what I want to remember, or because I had no other choice but to write. For everything I've written in these last ten or eleven years, I am quite certain that I have no intention of showing any of it to anyone ever. Unless, of course, my therapist twists an arm hard.

And then I started doing this diary thing, for just about a week now. And I have written every day (I think), and I'm writing mostly because I have to. But if I have no intention of showing it to anyone, then why don't I just type it out and save it on my hard drive and password protect the file? Why do I have to keep a diary site, and tinker with the colors and fonts and links and check the code every day to make sure it's just perfectly what I want it to be?

If I don't expect anyone to read it, what the hell do I need a counter and a guestbook for?

Again, who would bother even to care about little insignificant me? Looks like the whole attraction of this project is to see if anyone reads it, cares at all, will notice that I even bother to do this. Considering my previous entry, it would certainly be best if my colleague at work didn't stumble across it.

But I will check my counter and my guestbook and see what happens. How does anyone find anyone else's diary to read, anyway? I'm not even sure how I found the few that I've started to read.

Fascinating. It's like having a penpal who doesn't even know she or he is writing to you. So far ... intriguing. Yes, Spock; intriguing.


ENTRY #9