Reading: What's that?

Moving: Hauling and swimming

House: Hauling

23 May 2000: A Letter to Nisou

I mentioned to Nisou that I met a couple of online friends yesterday. She asked, in email, how you make a web page, anyway, and didn't I worry about online people turning out to be maniacal weirdos. This is what I didn't tell her:

RDC taught me dead basic HTML a few years ago but mostly I use web-authoring software (Dreamweaver). When I made my first page it was one page listing my favorite books and people, the usual amateur home page stuff.

I have more now.

See...okay, you're the first friend I've told directly. PLT knows because he explored my site, which is obvious from my email address. PSA (1st boyf, you met him in '92) knows because he explored my site. DMB knows. A few DU people know because they've gone to my page from RDC's page.

I have an on-line journal.

I've had one for three years.

In September of 1996 I was surfing at work because my officemate had just got a new kitten and I thought hey, maybe I can find some interesting cat names. I used a search engine to look for cat names and I came across a page about a man naming his cats. It was my first on-line journal (OLJ), written by a man named Bryon Sutherland in Denton, TX. My jaw dropped. This, this is what I wanted.

I read them avidly for six months, then started my own. I don't write about everything, but I write about more than I should, and I write it differently than I write my off-line journal and differently than I write letters to friends (in which I am much less inhibited). But I do write it, and that means I write something instead of my novel. I would be better off writing a novel, but I enjoy the journal and I can actually produce it, if shoddily and irregularly. Any novel of mine would be totally autobiographical anyway; this way I don't delude myself that it's anything else.

Jenn is new (November 99). Online she goes by Elphaba, which is the name of the Wicked Witch of the West in Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which is a great book that I highly recommend--you'll never watch "Wizard of Oz" the same way again. When she posted to a public page that Beth hosts, I emailed her and told her that was a great name to use. She noticed my URL in the email and read my journal (which is named Speaking Confidentially, an appropriately contradictory title for an OLJ, I think, as well as the title of one of my favorite Cowboy Junkies songs) and realized I live in Denver. She lives about an hour north, in a suburb of Fort Collins, where they keep the U of Northern CO. I read her site, and a few weeks later we met (in a nice safe public place) at Ocean Journey, the Denver aquarium.

Although we communicate mostly through journal entries and don't frequently email directly in an ongoing conversation, still we're pals. RDC and I went to their (her husband is Kevin) house a few weeks ago for a Trivial Pursuit night (my team lost) and next week we're going to a Cowboy Junkies concert together: RDC and I danced (embarrassingly badly, if you recall) to their "Anniversary Song" at our wedding and they danced to their "Angel Mine" at theirs.

This winter Beth mentioned in her journal that she was coming to Colorado in May for her brother's wedding (he lives in Laramie) and the three of us made plans to do something together on the Sunday. Then RDC and I bought the house, and a full day hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park was out, so the two couples just came to the house.

Beth and Jeremy also own a Craftsman bungalow, in Sacramento, and she is a manic gardener. She's an appellate lawyer and has a mostly-lab dog named Doc (and three cats, whose fault she says it is not that she doesn't love them anymore since getting Doc; she was mostly kidding) and is a fantastic writer. She reads (it was from her and later from PLT that I got recommendations for Wicked). She thinks. She debates really well.

And there's Shelley, who lives in Long Beach CA and has a million pets and a caustic wit. And Jessie who lives in Palo Alto CA and wants to move back to MA and imitates elephants with her long braids as tusks and reads as many children's books as I do. (Jenn calls Jessie and me two peas in a pod.) And Sara, a freelance journalist living in [southern Florida] and Manhattan, a superb writer and gracious and kind person. And Melissa near Philadelphia, who also reads oodles of children's books. And Cara, who lives in Canada somewhere with her daughter Fiona and is one of the few people I've known who's read Mandy, the best children's book ever, written by Julie Edwards (who is Julie Andrews the actress writing under her husband's name, but with her picture on the cover). And Jen, who's in getting her MD/PhD at UCSF and grew up in Amherst and got her BA at the U of Chicago. And Kim in Seattle, who is one of the funniest people I've ever read. And Mary Anne, who teaches and writes (by which I mean sells) in Salt Lake City, where she moved I think by mistake because she really belongs in Berkeley, where she lived before, and who reminds me of you in lots of good ways.

And about two thousand others, but those are my favorites, the ones I correspond with.

There have been relationships and friendships and flame wars and everything, on-line and face to face. Not unexpectedly, people fluent and easy enough with the web that they'd put their lives on it tend to be geeky, sf-readers, and Star Trek watchers . Therefore there was only a matter of time until there was a convention. The first JournalCon is the second weekend in October of this year.

And you know where I'll be the second weekend of October? I'll be at TJZ's wedding, with you all and without regrets.