(no subject)

[geekchick]

Today is Pungenday, day 12 in the season of Confusion, 3269.

Four and a half days of sun, roughly, in the last month-plus; today is not one of those days. =P

Lots of thoughts swirling around today, but most of them are not really wanting to be put down on paperelectrons right now. Still feeling a little leftover sadness from yesterday, and I didn't sleep all that well because of odd dreams. (At least these weren't nightmares, just weird; since when did Paderborn look so much like the not-all-that-close-to-reality version of Rosslyn, VA that keeps appearing in my dreams? Of course I've never actually been to Paderborn, so for all I know it could look like an odd version of Rosslyn but odds are very much against that being the case. =) Why was I in Paderborn in the first place, of all the places in the world I could be? And why on earth were the particular people involved showing up in my dreams anyway? ) I feel a bit bad that I'm posting to LJ when I have so much email that I need to answer that has been waiting for a very long time; for anyone who's not gotten an email response from me in the last while, I promise it is not because I'm ignoring you or your mail.

I read a bit of commentary elsewhere that raised the question of whether it would be considered rude or deceptive to not read the journals of people you have on your friends list. Not that I think anyone particularly cares, but yes, I have filters which I use for making posts but not for reading purposes. Yes, I have a "default view", although at the moment the only journals that are not on that default view are some high-volume communities; even when there are individuals who aren't on the default view for some reason, I do go back and read their posts as I have time. I add people to my (unfortunately-named) "friends" list because I know them in contexts outside LJ (real life, or a shared mailing list perhaps) and I want to keep up with them, or because I've run across them somewhere on LJ and found what they had to say intriguing. I don't expect anyone who has me on their friends list to have read every single post of mine, especially when I was posting a lot more frequently than I am now, and I don't mind if someone I add to my friends list doesn't reciprocate necessarily, especially so if it's someone I haven't met outside LJ. I think a lot of unnecessary drama comes out of the attitude that "I added you to my friends list so now you have to add me in return, and if you happen to not add me or drop me later I will take it ever so personally". We've all commented before, I think, on the loaded "friends" designation for a list of people whose journals you like to read, so [insert previous rant here].

I use my journal mostly as a way to let my friends know what I'm up to, or to make note of things that catch my eye. I'm not sure why it's so much easier to keep up with a journal in this format than it is for me to keep a paper journal. Perhaps it's that it's easier for me to dash off a few words in the client than it is for me to actually pick up a pen. And some of it, I suspect, is that with a paper journal I felt compelled somehow to be "profound", that making little notes of what I did with my day didn't merit the effort of actually writing it down. I don't know why that is. I wish I had something like fifthconundrum's insight or forioscribe's storytelling ability, but I just don't. It's easier for me to hit "delete" on an old post if I want it to go away than it is for me to rip pages out of a paper journal or throw the whole thing away. ( I just recently threw away a couple of paper journal attempts from college while I was decluttering. Reading them again I realized how utterly angstful they were; I never wrote anything when I wasn't in the midst of some emotional upheaval it seems and reading those pages really just brought back a bunch of bad memories and no particularly good insights, although I'm sure it seemed that there was something profound there to me at the time.) So here I am now, with an electronic journal I'll have kept up with regularly for three years as of tomorrow. I do sometimes wish that a higher percentage of the 1,192 posts included something I felt was more insightful, but I'm not going to stress about it. I like reading other people's "what I did with myself today" posts, and I doubt I'm the only one who does. I tend to assume that people who read my journal do so for a reason, and who am I to tell anyone what is and is not worth reading?

Good things about LJ for me: it's been a way for me to reconnect with several people from my past that I've missed terribly; it's put me in contact with a whole host of fascinating, witty, intelligent, wonderful people that I might not have known otherwise; it lets me keep up with what my distant friends and loves are doing without spending my entire paycheck on that evil invention known as the phone; it gives me the occasional safe space to vent.

Of course, with the good there's always the bad. Drama. Drama, drama, drama. Friends-list drama, interpersonal relationship drama, you name it and there's been a whole freakin' lot of it, it seems. Sometimes the minor stuff is fun to watch in a "train wreck, can't look away" sort of way, but the longer it goes on and the nastier it gets, the more I just don't want to be around it. I personally, as wolfy and brian1789 will probably confirm, do not like to hash out problems with my partners on LJ; having an argument via livejournal is the equivalent to me of standing in the corner at a party and having a loud fight that everyone in the area can hear. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about anyone's posts about relationship problems or whatever else stressful is going on in their lives; I'm all about having space to vent, and I certainly do that myself. It's things like seeing someone break up with a partner via a journal post rather than in person, or watching some of the arguments I've seen conducted in posts and comments that really IMO should've been taken to email that just make me uncomfortable. Yes, I know where my "page down" key is, and I do make use of it as required, just as I'd move away from a loud fight at a party; if it's not in my own personal space, I feel like it's my responsibility to remove myself from the cause of the discomfort (although if it's occurring in my space/journal, I feel completely justified in asking the cause of my discomfort to take it elsewhere).


Hm. Longer than I thought. I think it's time to go pick up my pre-ordered "Andromeda" DVD, the one with the second season episode with James Marsters (James Marsters and Keith Hamilton Cobb in the same scene makes for some *serious* eye-candy, mmmmmmmm), and try to get something house-cleaning related accomplished today. Wish me luck.

Comments

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Good luck! ;-)

I think you use LJ similarly to how I do - a way to keep up with folks long-distance and jot things down/share things of interest. I also hate relationship "politics" and have sworn to myself that I won't maintain a relationship via LJ. It's hard when sometimes that's the only way I commuincate with some folks, but I figure if I or zie want more, we move beyond this forum. The whole concept of "friends list politics", as I call it, makes me cringe.

The "Friends List" lends itself to all sorts of false assumptions

[telnar.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of the way that LJ manages journal viewing. Because the "friends list" is public, some people assume that it's intended as a statement of some kind. In my case, I decided a few weeks after joining LJ that I preferred to read journal entries in context (i.e. catching up on one author before moving to the next one as opposed to reading in chronological order). So, after that point, I started adding new journals as bookmarks rather than as "friends" (yes, I know that this approach only works because I read a relatively small number of journals and do not try to keep continuously up to date).