15 February 2002 (Friday)
words
I'm having a fit of self-consciousness about this whole online journal thing. Figuring I should post something today; suddenly wondering whether I should make a concerted effort to be interesting. Realizing that, in real life, making concerted efforts to be interesting have backfired considerably in the past. Pondering the people who actually read this thing, and what keeps them coming back. Blinking at how commercially entrepreneurial my train of thought has become. Deciding I need a drink of water.
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posted by enjelani @ 04:53 PM PST [ link ]
14 February 2002 (Thursday)
good day
I have been Productive today. Ran a number of pressing errands during a long lunch break, then came back and burrowed into the code, sketching out strategies for some very cool enhancements to the stuff I'm working on. Ah, this feels so nice. Like a massage to the brain: apply pressure evenly and forcefully, and the result is, paradoxically, relaxation.
Off to go visit Soren, who is having a guilt attack about this whole V-day boycott thing. He must have looked at one too many shop windows.
posted by enjelani @ 07:24 PM PST [ link ]
13 February 2002 (Wednesday)
Internet addiction
I have come to a sobering conclusion: web-surfing is a drug. An illegal drug. Grown in hydroponic closets. That there's some fucked-up shit, man.
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posted by enjelani @ 12:16 PM PST [ link ]
12 February 2002 (Tuesday)
in protest
First rant here at the last embassy. Brace yourself.
Soren and I are boycotting Valentine's Day. This was my idea. I'm sick of seeing all my guy friends (i.e. the vast majority of my friends) either moping because they're single or stressing because Doom is imminent. I swear, who gave women the right to demand diamonds and roses and a candlelight dinner? Where's the reward in that, on either side? Sheesh.
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posted by enjelani @ 10:13 AM PST [ link ]
11 February 2002 (Monday)
breaking free
It was Zach's twenty-fifth birthday yesterday. I got him a Premium subscription to Salon.com. Given our current state of communicating mostly through email and online chatting, it seemed apropos. He's also started an online journal himself -- yet another byte-based form of communication, though more indirect than the others. I just saw it for the first time today; maybe I'll link to it soon.
While reading through it, I had a bittersweet sort of realization. Everything that I've always loved most about him seems to be coming through there in his journal: his passion for learning, his curiosity about and instinctive understanding of life's deeper patterns. And as he alluded to making new
friends, studying Japanese, practicing aikido, filling his hours and days with what he's always wanted to do...it was then that I finally realized why we'd broken up.
We had been holding each other back.
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posted by enjelani @ 06:21 PM PST [ link ]
quandary
I haven't been neglecting the last embassy. I've been writing entries and not posting them. This last one may go up shortly. But I have to think about it a little longer.
Slithy Tove recently featured an entry on responsibility, with regard to online journals. The author had realized that, far from being a cyberspatial confession booth where she could say anything she wanted, it was more akin to walking into a room full of friends and acquaintances and shouting her opinions, without any thought given to who might hear them and be affected by them. Dardy's visited that subject often, too, being as startlingly frank as he can be sometimes. Journals are, by definition, revelatory; but when they're public, do they need to be selectively so? And if so, what's lost and gained in that, in holding one's tongue on certain subjects?
posted by enjelani @ 06:33 PM PST [ link ]