Too late to be thinking this much

[mizz_sp3ll]

I was just thinking of the big baby tears I would cry if for some reason LJ crashed and my journal was completely deleted. Beginning to rethink this whole online thing, it's too delicate, too flimsy almost. I started this because I was/am too lazy to maintain a written journal, and I wanted to get back into writing something, anything again. But then I got a letter (a real live handwritten stamped letter!) from my dearie out in Portland and she touched upon the lost art of letter writing. Being an archivist, she lamented the fact that generations fifty or one hundred years from now won't have a record of how we lived, who we loved, what we did with our days. But she wondered if these days and our lives are even noteworthy enough for future generations to take an interest in. As our methods of documentation become more artificial and superficial, so do our lives. I often pour my heart out into this thing, and appreciate its immediacy and capacity, yet when I look over past entries I do feel removed from the emotion. Old diaries and journals from adolescence and past travels not only tell the story with the words, but with the physical piece itself. The yellowing paper, the tear-smudged ink, my furious oft-changing handwriting. So it makes me slightly uncomfortable to know that I've emptied quite a lot of myself into the ether, putting my trust into bits of binary code to retain those stories. I almost went so far as to print out old entries and make a book out of them. I still might.

I don't really know where I'm going with this.