A Life Less Ordinary

All day today: Jamming out to a Mariah and J.Legend duet. "With You I'm Born Again." Here's the MP3.

There was a time when I had a thriving blog community of friends. Like people I knew were starting blogs left and right. Coming out of college, there was all this extra time at work -- especially if you had a starter office job -- and this desire to express what your post-college life was like. People wanted to vent and share and experience vicariously.

Of course, blogging takes effort and just a few years after the blogger boom, eighty percent of those blogs died and went to heaven. Check the list on the right side of this page. It's littered with the skeletons of blogs. Like the bubonic plague ripped through, or someone came with a big gun and took no prisoners.

Still, the basic question remains: What are my friends up to? I guess the answer is just to check Facebook but really that seems so formulaic. I'd rather get an idea of what they've actually been up to away from relationship status, whatever I can glean from demystifying other people's comments, and the occasional picture update.

I've been pushing moblogs on anyone who has the technology but I guess it's really the same thing as frequent photo uploads. It just seems more exciting to see photos dated and archived nice and neat. I fail to believe that people don't want to share their lives. If anything, it feels more important nowadays to share because as we get older (or as my life gets more insular I guess) it becomes more fulfilling to know about the little details in your friends' lives. Like we'd all feel more connected and less out of touch if we could have moblogs.

Yes, this was pretty much just a public service announcement for creating a moblog, especially if you have an iPhone. It's seriously awesome to be able to go back a few months and look over what you've been doing pictorially. Also, whatever event you end up moblogging looks like it was super fun because you're capturing a slice of the moment. Even if your life is totally boring, a moblog will help you spice it up for posterity. I promise.

The other thing I wanted to talk about was journaling. I wonder how many of my friends journal. I'd say a lot of my female friends do -- girls generally like to get out how they feel -- but I wonder how many of my guy friends have done it, and when they started if they have one. Guys have a lot of shit going on too. I'm curious when/what prompted them to put pen to paper.

Growing up, I was never the journaling type. I loved owning journals and the idea of filling one up with my writings was really exciting but I never really got around to it. Even in college, I never had one. I wish I had one through high school actually, because that whole period of time seems so blurry to me. What was I thinking playing role playing games during lunch every day? Can someone explain that to me? Thirteen year old me, please defend yourself. With an enchanted mace +4 preferably.

I started my journal in 2001, probably a month before Nine-Eleven. I'm glad I did because that period of time marked some epochal changes and now I can look back to see what it sort of felt like to live through it. During one particular long stretch at a dead end job, I even went back and tried to recreate my college years in journal fashion.

What do I journal about? Generally speaking, it's stuff that I don't really feel like talking to other people about. Much of it is just recaps of life for the memory banks. A lot of it is about girls and relationships because those generally feel too private to just have out there willy nilly. I wish it had more of a component of introspection but it's sadly not that way very often. I've never learned the habit of journaling often enough to have a build up and analysis period. It's been mostly just getting the stuff down so I can move on.

Along with pushing moblogs, I want to push everyone (especially guy friends) to start journaling. Plus, in a way, journaling makes your life feel more real I think. I mean, it seems like many great men and women have journals. You could illogically deduce that by journaling you'll be destined to be a great person. Think about how often scholars are saying "And from his journals we can see that..." When I die and scholars are poring over the things I left behind, I want them to be able to say the same thing. "From his journals, we can tell that he was a super geek. How incredible his subsequent meteoric rise. Let this be a lesson to us all."

Oh I was also reading about how memories are actually the most unreliable of all sources. So in a way, a journal is a way to preserve your own lies. I like the thought of that. It's generally considered by other people that whatever you write in private is the truth (as in how you feel or what happened) but in fact it's more often your own twisted version memories of memories. There's a lot to be said for self delusionment isn't there?

My tips for creating an online private journal

1. Don't use full names, or even your own real name if possible
2. If you're using Blogger, don't have it linked with your normal Gmail account
3. Lock it up but consider letting close friends read it once you've got the writing rhythm down
4. Turn off search engine submission and spider crawling
5. Let me read it. Just kidding. Well, sort of.

To be honest, I don't really trust Blogger's privacy settings too fully but I know LiveJournal is really good about it. I wish Blogger would let you password protect only certain entires. If you're old school and like writing on regular looking paper on-screen, check out Penzu. Penzu also has a page that has some ideas about what to journal.