Another Way to Quit Your Web Journal

Even if you keep writing your web journal for whatever reason, as described in "option one" above, you'll still quit eventually. No, really, I'm serious. 100% Guaranteed. Bear with me.

In a fit of under-socialization, I thought maybe joining the ezboard goth community that several of my friends spend several hours a day on would be a good way to interact with some new people. Nevermind that I'm not a goth: I lack pretentiousness, I don't call myself "Lord"-anything, I don't even own much in the way of black clothing. I wanted to be social, and didn't want to get up off my lazy ass to do it.

So, I opened an account and started clicking around, paging through posts just like I used to do on the BBSs. Within an hour after starting, I felt like Lloyd Dobler after his encounter with the guys at the Gas'N'Sip: "That was a bad idea." I couldn't connect with any of the posts, let alone the people behind them. There were too many in jokes and references to events I wasn't around for. I tried looking at profiles, trying to get the history, even linking out to home pages to see what I could see, but all to no avail. Most members of this online community also kept LiveDramas, which held ream upon boring ream of everything that online journals are famous for. Goths, who knew? Then, rather suddenly it seemed, I ran into an "In Memoriam" page for someone who had, after years of cancer and chemotherapy, died. And on that page I saw a link to the deceased's online journal.

...Click.

As I read through her journal, I began to get uncomfortable. That nice looking girl with the magenta wig smiling out at me from the profile was past tense. I was reading a strange, extremely long epitaph she unknowingly wrote for herself. I can't explain how surreal (even creepy) it felt to read about somebody's daily life and times - their mudane thoughts and feeling spelled out in all their glorious plainess - viewed from the perspective of their being gone. She wrote her last entry about a month before she died, sounding upbeat despite her pain and fear.

A week later, I ran into this node. As I finished reading it, I thought of a girl with a magenta wig, and I knew "option one" would work just as well as "option two": no matter how much you write, eventually you'll have to stop because you'll be too busy pushing up bitwise daisies.