Faces

Surely you have Internet friends. You know--the ones that don't seem like they are the crazy stalker type. And, like any other human being (except for a select few), you have your own personal images of what they look like, based on their personality as revealed from their writing.

It can be a shock when you actually see what they look like. Usually it's a way different picture than what you had in mind (like, if you imagined them as someone who looked like they had a life away from the Internet as well as one on it, they usually end up looking like your average person).

Also, different names can give you different images. Take the name Theodora, for example. You might not quickly come up with the wife of Byzantine emperor Justinian, but it would still be way different than what a person named Theodora actually looked like.

Anyway, I'm just saying that writing reveals a whole 'nother side of you that your real-life friends probably would never discover.

Reasons

Online journal=blog

Why anyone would want to pour out their innermost feelings and chuck them up onto a website for the whole world to see is beyond me. Why don't you just type it in a Word document or something? Do you really want everyone to know why you were having a bad day, or is that just for FaceBook so you can get sympathetic comments? Well, you know what word is in sympathetic? Yeah. Pathetic. I really don't get why people would want to publish a journal, unless...

1. The journal's author is dead (think Anne Frank and Ayn Rand).
2. You are not afraid of embarrassment.
3. Your life is so interesting that someone told you that you should publish your journal, and you believe them.
4. The embarrassing pieces have been removed from your journal.
5. You are the most famous person on the planet and you are publishing your life story so you can avoid a bunch of interviews, and writing a memoir/autobiography is too hard.
6. It's a publicity stunt.
7. Someone stole your journal and decided to publish it for fun (resulting in numerous tears and backlashes and angry words).

Okay, so maybe the last one is a bit far-fetched.

Anyway, after all that ranting about why an online journal is such a bad idea, you might be wondering why I'm even making a blog.

Part of the reason is reason #4 for publishing a journal. I am not going to record a single embarrassing moment here, as if it were a real journal. Nope. I might talk about what is going to happen in my life, though, but I need you to understand that that is entirely different from an embarrassing moment. Another part of the reason is that I need somewhere to type out my feelings and make some sense of them, because I don't like typing my feelings down in a Word document. It feels too impersonal, as if I was writing it for an English class assignment.

So I welcome you to my thoughts. I hope you don't find them too repulsive.