I'm scared. I stopped journaling nearly a month ago and have told myself that to resist my hourly urges just to jot that down was liberating. Four weeks later I feel like I've lost this unrecorded chunk of time.
I have tried to parse the relative merits and demerits in my life of the on-line aspects of my journal and the best I can come up with is that I am an exhibitionist, an escribitionist, and I like it, but I haven't delved my online self as deeply as my offline self because of fear of discovery and being known by the known as well as the unknown.
I have been thinking about career possibilities and whatnot that would be more fulfilling to me than being a staff assistant at as cool a place as Dot Org. I had this prolonged (in my experience, for the person involved) email conversation about the online and offline community that has sprung up among online journalers; she told me no such community existed. The very day I (most recently) quit, PLT came out with this idea of developing a concordance of my web journal (finally acknowledging knowing about it for "I don't know, about a year?"). Then friends approached us about designing the web site for their proposed new business. All of this happened in a week, and altogether I decided this was a good time to stop. Too many simultaneous signs all indicating this was a project that wasn't as professionally useful as I intended, that wasn't as personally fulfilling as its offline self, that indeed seems to strangle its offline aspect, that was known by someone whom I struggle to trust, that took time from pursuing more worthwhile web wonk and even web work.
So I stopped.
I've stopped thrice before, once early in 1998 when I decided I didn't like myself or my writing online, and twice this year, in April when I discovered, after it had been online almost a week, that I had posted something much more revealatory than I had ever intended because I am a careless fool and in June when I began my summer-long descent into depression, before again and I thought finally early last month.
And that, I thought, would be that. I would write the long letters for which I was once known to my friends (not to strangers). I would rediscover the voice I had silenced when that voice might have blabbed to the world my secrets. Here were such long letters from DEDBG and HEBD, deserving an equal response. DEDBG wrote to our crowd and a woman I'd never heard of--a new friend that she's made who belongs in our ranks. HEBD wrote to our crowd as well plus a woman I'd never heard of--a new friend she's made who belongs in our ranks. Where are my new friends of that caliber and timbre? Not made through the OLJ, the medium to which I have devoted the bulk of my writing energy.
There are people whom I like and feel close to through this medium but it is a precarious and one-sided affair, not nearly as interacive as I should wish. Beth, Columbine, and Shelley I read with some sense of knowing them. I know more about their day-to-day lives than I do about the daily lives of my Heavy People, the nearest of whom is twelve hours away by car. I discovered OLJs in September of 1996, the month I met HAO, the month my parents visited each in turn, the month that marked my one-year anniversary in Denver and the beginning of RDC's comps year. I have wondered how much my liking of these serial journals has to do with my weakness for "General Hospital" (which I have, thank you so much, licked) and escapist fiction that does not challenge my intellect but does allow me fantastic getaways.
Speaking of which, reading the analysis of Mansfield Park in A.S. Byatt's critical essays Imagining Characters I was again displeased with myself for never considering the layers of possible meaning in Jane Austen, the most complex (or the most academically accepted) of my usual escapist authors. So even in my evasions I evade.
I can't stop writing. How much I stay online and how much off I cannot say, but I cannot be silent. I cannot say with confidence, "I am a writer," but I can say truthfully, "I write." And I am an exhibitionist, and if in my audience I imagine some forgiveness from quarters from which I rationally can expect no quarter, then that is another element of my escapist imagination and I cannot condemn myself for being who I am. I may not be a writer but I do write.
My most recent last entry was the lyrics to Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger," which came to me in a response to the nonrelationship I have with other OLJers. Intimate but one-sided, serial and ongoing but removed. At first I told myself that as soon as I woke up without "It was early morning yesterday; I was up before the dawn" in my head, I could consider myself healed and start up again. That took about two weeks. By that time, I had come up with the new plan that not writing was liberating.
That simply didn't wash, but I waited for today, the first of the next month if not a full month from the last time. I barely wrote with a pen; I made hardly any notes. The obligation of putting it online, of (poorly) proofreading my typos and connecting one entry to the previous one (along with the guilt of never learning a program to do such a simple administrative task); of censoring myself, ideally just before posting but in practice during the writing process so that my journal was no longer the outlet of a lonely girl that it had started as, that I liked it as.
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After Cavedweller, I read An Underground Education, which was one of my selections from QPB, which I'm not at all sure about joining. An Underground Education is goofy and kind of like a Guinness Book of World Records for adults. The author claims primary research supports his peripheral facts. He doesn't claim that Catherine the Great had sex with her horse, at least, but it's poorly copyedited and at best served as a decoy for the much worse Auel crap I wasted my three days off with.
Now I'm reading Forbidden Knowledge, which I believe QPB paired with An Underground Education, which is why I doubt QPB. Forbidden Knowledge I like. Unlike the former, it is scholarly, except I never trust my own judgment gauging how worthy his scholarship is. The theme he explores is humans' unquenchable thirst for knowledge, despite the search or the knowledge being forbidden, despite whatever detriment the discovery brings. From the beginning, humans have been forbidden knowledge but have gone after it anyway: Prometheus brought mankind [sic] fire, and Zeus punished them with Pandora, who opened a forbidden box from which flew misery, war, strife, and the usual litany of evils humankind endures (along with hope, at the very bottom of the box). Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. These are western civ's earliest myths. Anyway, I like it so far, and it was beginning to read it this morning that made me realize how much I've missed my own quest for knowledge through writing, however pointless that pursuit is for anyone but myself.
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Also yesterday HAO passed her comps, hooray! She's been a damp bundle of nerves for the past few months, keener and damper and spinning wilder especially in the past month. She specifically forbade me to hold vigil outside the conference room where the examinations take place, which personally I thought didn't speak well for her confidence but which I respected. So I sent flowers to the English department so I could be kind of there. The first I heard was voicemail, which RDC retrieved: "The flowers must have been good luck." I hove a sigh of relief. In RDC's year are CGK and her husband, CPR and RBR, RDC and me, Dexy and his wife. (Those without initials (or names) aren't in the program.) Toward the end of the second year, on five separate occasions, seven or more of us would wait for the eighth to emerge. I was totally confident of RDC, more so than of anyone else (which is why I married him instead of anyone else), but even so I was numb by the time he came out. Dexy's committee was about to flunk him but he, with his Dexiness, said now look, if you didn't like my answers you should have said so at the time and not now at the end so instead of reexamining me in six months let's do it right now and he simply badgered them and wouldn't let them leave the room and after more than twice as long as we expected, he and his committee emerged, bruised but victorious; my first toast was "To Dexy and his arrogance!" So this is what we all go through, and I wanted to go through it with HAO as well, but she insisted.
So anyway we met at Alfalfa's, which is a grocery store with a cafˇ that is the only place remotely restaurant-like where JEM, a vegan, will eat. I showed HAO my leg, said it's what I deserved for blowing her off dog-walking. And off we all went to Hemingway's (a bar) to schmooze. Now, over a year ago, RDC and I got back from a Saturday of skiing and I collapsed on a sofa like Lady Bertram while RDC went out. There was no way I was going out, but I could call HAO and tell her the depths of my television-watching depravity: I was channel-hopping among "Parent Trap," "Ghost," and "Willow" (the last isn't depraved). She told me she was reading Redburn, a Herman Melville novel that, mercifully, is shorter than Moby-Dick. "Then is it about a smaller whale?" I asked. Well we thought that was pretty damn hysterical. This might have been the night I told her about Oksana Baiul being the Margery Kempe of the skating world as well. The other thing is that in "Shakespeare in Love," Shakespeare begins Romeo and Juliet as a comedy called "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter." Anyway, last night at Hemingway's we talked about what questions she'd been asked and whatnot and of course I asked about Redburn, clumsily since I couldn't remember the title. RDC announced to the table at large that the original title of Redburn was "Redburn and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter" at which HAO and I cracked up. JEM didn't get it though--he won't see the movie because it stars Gwyneth Paltrow and she wears fur.
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