"... but I got my pride."
Aug. 28th, 2004 01:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexr_rwxI know I say this a lot, but journaling is a terribly strange thing. Given the opportunity to stick some text up on the web, what are you going to do with it? Is this meant to be (or rather, do I mean for it to be) more blogger-ish, where I'm making a running commentary on world events and maybe putting up interesting links to stuff? Should I go opendiary-style and pour out my inner turmoil? If I write more than a few sentences, does anybody even read it? I mean, considering how I'm normally posting about some chunk of code that I've been playing with, and how yesterday I went running in the park and saw a cute dog...
One interesting feature of the journaling experience is that if I post something about feeling sad or depressed or lonely, there's a small set of my readers who will very quickly respond, check in on me, offer assurance and a nice word or three... and that's very kind. But honestly, I almost don't want to make people go through the trouble of worrying about me for minor instances of Feeling Down. Because I'm very rarely actually depressed... just little moments of pain or confusion or loneliness that everybody goes through, I'm sure, but most just don't post about them on LJ.
I think a lot of the motivation behind people using LJ is guilt. I think we wish that we were in better contact with people, and we use this as a medium to keep a degree of correspondence going with them. Having somebody on your flist is often sort of a manifestation of a half-hearted "man, I should talk to Phillis more often" feeling. And I suspect that, honestly, my posts aren't all that exciting but people feel some sort of obligation to have me on their flists out of some level of caring...
Any inner turmoil that I have is not terribly great. And I wonder if my discussing it here has any sort of positive effect -- is this a psychologically healthy behaviour? What I'm experiencing ("going through" sounds completely overdramatic) is neither particularly intense nor new in the slightest. I'm probably an example in somebody's psychology textbook: lonely, isolated-feeling, twitchy geek white boy who occasionally pretends to be extroverted and sociable.
"I don't want to be a fucked up, middle-class college student no more!"
-- Lou Reed, "I Wanna Be Black"
In the end analysis, though (you knew this was coming): I can certainly write LISP for Ashwin's NLU class, and I've certainly got Gentoo comfortably set up on a new Macintosh. And I'll certainly be off to Jacksonville tomorrow morning, so you won't see me around 'til Saturday night or maybe Sunday. And that's that.
One interesting feature of the journaling experience is that if I post something about feeling sad or depressed or lonely, there's a small set of my readers who will very quickly respond, check in on me, offer assurance and a nice word or three... and that's very kind. But honestly, I almost don't want to make people go through the trouble of worrying about me for minor instances of Feeling Down. Because I'm very rarely actually depressed... just little moments of pain or confusion or loneliness that everybody goes through, I'm sure, but most just don't post about them on LJ.
I think a lot of the motivation behind people using LJ is guilt. I think we wish that we were in better contact with people, and we use this as a medium to keep a degree of correspondence going with them. Having somebody on your flist is often sort of a manifestation of a half-hearted "man, I should talk to Phillis more often" feeling. And I suspect that, honestly, my posts aren't all that exciting but people feel some sort of obligation to have me on their flists out of some level of caring...
Any inner turmoil that I have is not terribly great. And I wonder if my discussing it here has any sort of positive effect -- is this a psychologically healthy behaviour? What I'm experiencing ("going through" sounds completely overdramatic) is neither particularly intense nor new in the slightest. I'm probably an example in somebody's psychology textbook: lonely, isolated-feeling, twitchy geek white boy who occasionally pretends to be extroverted and sociable.
"I don't want to be a fucked up, middle-class college student no more!"
-- Lou Reed, "I Wanna Be Black"
In the end analysis, though (you knew this was coming): I can certainly write LISP for Ashwin's NLU class, and I've certainly got Gentoo comfortably set up on a new Macintosh. And I'll certainly be off to Jacksonville tomorrow morning, so you won't see me around 'til Saturday night or maybe Sunday. And that's that.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-08-27 11:37 pm (UTC)for what it's worth [which, in the end, isn't that much] you're on my friend list because there's nothing better than a bit of LISP to make you think
instead of going off on a completely unrelated tanget i'm going to talk about how you just barely missed being subjected to a long, and completely unrelated, tanget that I was about to go off on
as far as motivation goes, does it matter? i mean, the whole point of a livejournal is just to push thoughts from here to there... and as long as that's accomplished does it really matter if anybody takes it in... of course I guess if what you're saying w/ the guilt thing is true then the motivation is more of a 'i'm going to pretend i care about what's happening in your life' kind of thing... which just seems silly
but i'm going to start rambling because my eyes hurt and everything's fuzzy/blurry right now
that has no point -- but be confident in the knowledge that no matter how inane your post being on my friend list means that within an hour [or so] of any given post, at any given time, there's a good chance it'll already have been considered for comment before I decide that what I'm saying is completely unrelated =)
but righ... blurry
I'll tell you what it all means
Date: 2004-08-28 06:28 am (UTC)"But honestly, I almost don't want to make people go through the trouble of worrying about me for minor instances of Feeling Down."
and no it's not any trouble for people to worry about each other, it's what humans do, it's one of the beautiful things that sets us apart from the earthworms. you keep up with your journaling. Anyone who doesn't want to read it can skip it. Life is too wonderful to waste time wondering about why we do what we do. Just carry on.
-Your friend in Happy World
no subject
Date: 2004-08-28 08:30 am (UTC)I'm interested to see your perception of Open Diary, by the way. Have you ever actually been there and/or used it?
I blog because it's a quick, easy, and enjoyable way to improve my own writing. And the people I read are good writers -- you included. This 'obligation to have you on my flist' crap is just that -- crap. (At least on my part.) If you constantly misspelled things, had terrible grammar, no sense of capitalization, wrote things like 'OmG i cOdED iN LisP 2DaY', et cetera -- I wouldn't have you on my flist.
And I read other people's blogs because I'm nosy.
Discussing your post-teenage angst here is entirely more healthy than keeping it in and perhaps blowing things up. Just because what you're going through isn't new or intense doesn't make it any less valid as a problem.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-29 08:47 pm (UTC)nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;"Live from the People's Republic"