Sometimes I fear that the Internet has taken too much control of my life.
For example, just now I was thinking about blogging about something, and then I thought, "Hey, I haven't written in my journal in a while." Remember journals. They're those things with paper in them, and you actually have to use some sort of writing utensil and write on the paper with the letters you learned in Kindergarten. No typing. Yeah, those things.
Okay, so, that's exaggerating a little bit. They haven't actually become that foreign to me. I have many journals and I still use them. But not as much as I used to. Now, I think about something and my immediate thought after that thought is, "Hey, I should blog about this," instead of, "Hey, there's a paper and a pen. Go write this down."
But sometimes you don't need to blog about things. Some people, I'm sure, have no trouble with this. I, on the other hand, have to stop myself a lot of the time. I'm a pretty open book, so just about anything is fair game. A lot of people probably don't think that about me, because I'm so silent all of the time. But I'm not silent because I'm unwilling to share, I'm silent because I'm not inclined to talk. Writing is a different story. I AM inclined to write. So that, combined with the fact that I find no shame in a total stranger knowing that as I made banana bread yesterday, I spoke to myself in a Cajun accent, there's no telling what I may end up sharing over the World Wide Web that most people probably didn't want to know.
For that reason, and because the art of writing on paper in your own hand is fading more and more everyday, I really need to write in my various journals more. It'll also give me something to do on nights like tonight when I should be sleeping, but can't go to sleep, and really need to do something that has nothing to do with the computer.
So if that's the case, what am I doing on here now? See! I told you it has too much control of my life!
I've had the "hey I should blog that" itch a lot since I first got a xanga four years ago (a very very distracting itch, like when I was in college and trying to do homework...); but I, too, have always clung to manual journaling. That's why I bought a really awesome journal last July. Sometimes I've gone weeks, even a month or two, without writing in it, but then I'll write in it constantly for a while. It's got an "ear" for certain kinds of thoughts and poems. Having just read Phantastes, I'd have to say it's kinda got the personality of the beech tree.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, though, it's typing I want to do, but with thoughts I don't have the energy to develop into publicly readable material. So I'll type the thoughts into a document.
The last part you wrote makes me think of handwriting, and how it's changed over the years. I still think it would be cool to develop my handwriting into a nice script. I think I've actually been seeing guys' handwriting develop from chicken scratch into something more scriptlike, while girls I know are still writing in exaggerated loops. For my part, my handwriting varies by my mood and angle of hand--from tight loops to chicken scratch to a nondescript print that looks, somehow, like me. So I don't know if I want to change it, lol.