we made it!

My mom has returned from her 2-week trip to Scotland. We survived two whole weeks without her! Yay!

I was worried there for a bit, seriously. I mean, I knew we'd survive, but I thought maybe I would go postal. Or at least be completely exhausted. I am tired, but no more so than normal, I think. Thanks are due to anotherjen in particular, and also a bunch of non-LJ-having friends, for helping to keep us busy and occupied and so forth.

Mom brought me back some shortbread, which I am eating as we speak. er, type. Damn, now I'm kicking myself for not having given her a whole empty suitcase and told her to bring it back filled with shortbread! This stuff is so damn good!!! Yum! And also argh, there's hardly any left already! Snif.

I finished reading The Salmon of Doubt and was very sad. I actually got teary-eyed at the end, when I realized that we'll never know what happens with Dave and the hang-glider, or with the woman's car, or the bifurcated feline or, of course, with Dirk and Zaphod. Snif. Douglas, we miss you.

*tries very hard not to even think about whether anyone ever wrote HHGG slash*

I've got a few other books started already, including A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows by Paul Anderson which I'm not sure I'll make it through, and The Game by Laurie King which needs to be savored. But first, I'm going to finally read The Da Vinci Code which I've been trying to get my hands on for quite a while. Now it turns out that my mom bought a copy of it to take on the plane with her, so I borrowed it. Given all the build-up (*everyone* has been talking about this book!), I hope it won't be a disappointment.

baaaa

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on interactivity and the purpose/nature of LJ

Like almost all LJ newbies, morgan_dhu recently went through some of the requisite pondering on what LJ is really "for," what purpose it serves, what people do/can/should use it for, and so forth. It seems to me that everyone goes through a bit of this when they join LJ. And almost everyone seems to find, after they've joined LJ, that the purpose for which they thought they were joining isn't really reflective of how they use it.

(I think that in some ways using the word "journal" in the title skews some people's perception of LJ. People come into it thinking of it as the online equivalent of a diary, and quickly find out that that doesn't translate, because a diary is generally very private and LJ is generally VERY public.)

Anyway, one thing Morgan mentioned in her musings was that she is seeing a different side of us in our LJs. Morgan and I and a bunch of other folks on my friend-list are on an email list together; and people on that list share lots of personal stuff about their lives, etc., such as one might sometimes post on LJ. But it's definitely true that I, for one, post different stuff on LJ than on the list. Sometimes I post the same stuff on both, sometimes not. A lot of the time, I use LJ as sort of a "brain-dump" where I post whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment, like "I saw a sunset; it was gorgeous" or "I'm hungry. Want chocolate" or "Go Red Sox!" Or, of course, quite frequently, "Check out these adorable pix of my baby!" ;) And it seems like none of that stuff (except the baby pix of course) is exactly appropriate for an email list; it feels too much like hogging the list with one's own personal minutiae. On LJ, though, you can feel free to hog, because it's YOUR livejournal and anyone who doesn't want to read it can just scroll onward. Or defriend you, in extreme cases of not-wanting-to-read-it. LJ is definitely egocentric in that sense.

And as plaidder has said, there's something in it of just wanting to reach out and connect with others over your stupid little random daily stuff. In many ways this is the result of what I see as a paradigm shift that the Internet has created; we want every aspect of our lives to be interactive in some sense now. Whereas in previous generations we might have been satisfied to write in our paper diaries "I'm hungry, want chocolate" and then go on with things, now we want someone to reply, even if it's just to say "I hear ya! I could use some choco-goodness right about now too!" How many of you have had the experience of being out there living your life and finding yourself thinking, "Wait'll I tell the email list about this!" or "I gotta post this on LJ!"? It's not enough any more to just live our lives; now we have to be sharing and critiquing them on-the-fly with a host of faceless others we only know by screen-names. And this of course translates to our entertainment as well; I really think that the 'net has fueled the way we view all forms of media now, and caused us to want them to be interactive in ways that we never did before -- hence the huge popularity of, for example, TV shows where you can vote on the outcome, and (taking it a step further) where you can actually be the TV show.

So LJ is just a part of the phenomenon, and it's a fun part, albeit sometimes nerve-wracking if you find yourself judging the quality of your life by how many comments you get on a particular post. ;) People of course use LJ for many different purposes, but I think one thing that everyone would have to agree with, if they were being strictly honest, is that we all want and need to know that someone else is reading it.