Journalversary!
Today we're celebrating the JOURNALVERSARY. Yes, folks, it's been ten years since a wee 17-year-old Laurie crawled onto the Internet and began documenting her life on black backgrounds with white text and creepy red links. A toast to you, 17-year-old self. Let's see what she had to say ten years ago tonight:
The Imperfect First Entry
October 27, 1997
written at 11:30 PM, while listening to the sounds of the Channel 2 "Action News"
I can't believe I didn't start this before.
No, wait. I can believe it. I didn't start this because I was waiting to write the perfect first online journal entry. I was waiting for some day to come along when something wonderfully meaningful would happen. Then, I would write about this wonderfully meaningful occurance and have this nice, deep journal entry.
Well, screw it. I might be waiting for that perfect day for the next sixty-five years. It might never come. Or it might come and I'd be having so much fun that I'd forget to write a journal entry about it. And then the day would be gone.
I think it is too late right now to try to write anything meaningful anyway.
So, anyway, this is my first entry. That is the only fanfare it will receive.
I am supposed to be writing a story right now. It's for my school paper. One of the co-editors of the paper, a friend of mine from freshman year, approached me about a week and a half ago and asked if I'd write a five-part fiction story for the next five issues of The Phoenix, the newspaper that defines the phrase "all style and no substance." Every issue since my sophomore year has been basically the same: a bunch of cute pictures and graphics and a bunch of short articles about stupid things, all written by people who never seemed to have passed fourth-grade grammar or learned to run a spell check program. Sigh.
So the co-editor, realizing that we needed some real articles this year, remembered a few stories I'd written in ninth grade. (Back when we were freshmen, I let her read one of my novels; I was still writing cheesy romances then.) I told her I'd write something that sounded sort of like my earlier stuff, and that I'd have it in by Wednesday, the 29th of October.
I'm still on the first page. I argued with both my parents tonight about what I should include in the story. I wanted to make it sort of satirical, to make fun of some of the stupid trends and slang at my school. My parents, however, are worried that I'm going to offend someone. Isn't that the point?? What good would my story do if it didn't ruffle anyone's feathers (pardon my cliche') and make them think?
I think I will post the story on a special spot on my web page when I get it done.
I was going to write about another annoying thing that happened today --an annoying thing that really made me reflect on a lot of events in my past, for that matter -- but I feel my eyelids drooping. It's not something I'm going to easily forget, so I think I'll save it for tomorrow's entry.
Notes from the current version of me:
I set myself up with Internet-writing problems from the get-go, didn't I? I struggled against perfectionism even before I had written a single entry. Sigh. My lingering goal, always, was to write finished, polished, self-contained journal entries -- if not every day, then at least a couple times a week. There were a few years when I was able to let that go, to accept that I was aiming for the impossible. That was around the time I switched to Livejournal and was updating a whole lot. But when blogging came to the masses with Blogspot and Movable Type and such, I began to see that some people really were able to achieve my discarded goal. A lot of those people sputter out after their 1-year blogiversary, but some soldier on -- political bloggers, music bloggers, book bloggers, and a few life-bloggers like Dooce. They write nearly every day, they don't apologize for length, and they write well. How do they do it?
The school newspaper really was pretty sad. During my freshman year, it was overseen by the gifted department, and we used two old computers, an ancient version of Pagemaker, and layout boards, scissors, and rubber cement to put the paper together. The next year, though, they turned it over to the career / tech department, had one of the P.E. teachers oversee its production, and put too much trust in the current layout programs for 1995-era Macs. I volunteered to copyedit that year, but when the P.E. teacher shot down my contention that "best friends" really was two words instead of one, I quit going to meetings.
(The paper was printed with the mistake. "The JV cheerleading squad is just one big group of bestfriends" was the quote.)
(Not that this journal entry, written two years after I quit copyediting, was linguistically stellar. I misspelled "occurrence.")
When I wrote the short story for the paper, I was careful to type "Fiction by Laurie Lastname" on every segment. And with every new issue, the "fiction" was left off. The handful of people in my classes who actually read the paper asked me what the heck my articles were supposed to be. It wasn't "satirical," by the way. Too bad I didn't have the nerve to do that. I did make fun of the constant use of the word random, which, sad to say, has persisted to this day. As in, "She's such a random person." What does that mean?
The story was the last piece of my fiction my parents read until a couple weeks ago, when I gave them a reading of my novel's first two chapters.
If there were a drinking game concerning my first year's worth of journal entries, you could get drunk very quickly by taking a drink every time you spotted the word "cheesy."
The Imperfect First Entry
October 27, 1997
written at 11:30 PM, while listening to the sounds of the Channel 2 "Action News"
I can't believe I didn't start this before.
No, wait. I can believe it. I didn't start this because I was waiting to write the perfect first online journal entry. I was waiting for some day to come along when something wonderfully meaningful would happen. Then, I would write about this wonderfully meaningful occurance and have this nice, deep journal entry.
Well, screw it. I might be waiting for that perfect day for the next sixty-five years. It might never come. Or it might come and I'd be having so much fun that I'd forget to write a journal entry about it. And then the day would be gone.
I think it is too late right now to try to write anything meaningful anyway.
So, anyway, this is my first entry. That is the only fanfare it will receive.
I am supposed to be writing a story right now. It's for my school paper. One of the co-editors of the paper, a friend of mine from freshman year, approached me about a week and a half ago and asked if I'd write a five-part fiction story for the next five issues of The Phoenix, the newspaper that defines the phrase "all style and no substance." Every issue since my sophomore year has been basically the same: a bunch of cute pictures and graphics and a bunch of short articles about stupid things, all written by people who never seemed to have passed fourth-grade grammar or learned to run a spell check program. Sigh.
So the co-editor, realizing that we needed some real articles this year, remembered a few stories I'd written in ninth grade. (Back when we were freshmen, I let her read one of my novels; I was still writing cheesy romances then.) I told her I'd write something that sounded sort of like my earlier stuff, and that I'd have it in by Wednesday, the 29th of October.
I'm still on the first page. I argued with both my parents tonight about what I should include in the story. I wanted to make it sort of satirical, to make fun of some of the stupid trends and slang at my school. My parents, however, are worried that I'm going to offend someone. Isn't that the point?? What good would my story do if it didn't ruffle anyone's feathers (pardon my cliche') and make them think?
I think I will post the story on a special spot on my web page when I get it done.
I was going to write about another annoying thing that happened today --an annoying thing that really made me reflect on a lot of events in my past, for that matter -- but I feel my eyelids drooping. It's not something I'm going to easily forget, so I think I'll save it for tomorrow's entry.
Notes from the current version of me:
I set myself up with Internet-writing problems from the get-go, didn't I? I struggled against perfectionism even before I had written a single entry. Sigh. My lingering goal, always, was to write finished, polished, self-contained journal entries -- if not every day, then at least a couple times a week. There were a few years when I was able to let that go, to accept that I was aiming for the impossible. That was around the time I switched to Livejournal and was updating a whole lot. But when blogging came to the masses with Blogspot and Movable Type and such, I began to see that some people really were able to achieve my discarded goal. A lot of those people sputter out after their 1-year blogiversary, but some soldier on -- political bloggers, music bloggers, book bloggers, and a few life-bloggers like Dooce. They write nearly every day, they don't apologize for length, and they write well. How do they do it?
The school newspaper really was pretty sad. During my freshman year, it was overseen by the gifted department, and we used two old computers, an ancient version of Pagemaker, and layout boards, scissors, and rubber cement to put the paper together. The next year, though, they turned it over to the career / tech department, had one of the P.E. teachers oversee its production, and put too much trust in the current layout programs for 1995-era Macs. I volunteered to copyedit that year, but when the P.E. teacher shot down my contention that "best friends" really was two words instead of one, I quit going to meetings.
(The paper was printed with the mistake. "The JV cheerleading squad is just one big group of bestfriends" was the quote.)
(Not that this journal entry, written two years after I quit copyediting, was linguistically stellar. I misspelled "occurrence.")
When I wrote the short story for the paper, I was careful to type "Fiction by Laurie Lastname" on every segment. And with every new issue, the "fiction" was left off. The handful of people in my classes who actually read the paper asked me what the heck my articles were supposed to be. It wasn't "satirical," by the way. Too bad I didn't have the nerve to do that. I did make fun of the constant use of the word random, which, sad to say, has persisted to this day. As in, "She's such a random person." What does that mean?
The story was the last piece of my fiction my parents read until a couple weeks ago, when I gave them a reading of my novel's first two chapters.
If there were a drinking game concerning my first year's worth of journal entries, you could get drunk very quickly by taking a drink every time you spotted the word "cheesy."