I'm Not a Girl....

.... so I know that I don't need to be purchasing cute little books with which to write my innermost personal thoughts in.

Wake up, people, it's the fucking thousands and something!

Blogging is writing a diary. Well, it's a lot of different things to a lot of different people. It can be a way for a band to promote new material, provide updates on tour dates, and post pictures of debauchery partaken with fans.

A blog can be a way for someone with strong opinions who was overlooked in high school (or just misses the attention that the idiot kids used to give them, as if it proved something about their worth as a human being). People use all different blogging websites to do this ranting, or espousing, or pseudo intellectual pontificating. Some people use blogging on certain websites to gain a sense of self importance, to become popular.

I'm not pointing fingers or anything.

Well, OK.

(ME) <------

------->(Anyone else who has ever used the term "Top Blogger" in a post on Myspazz)

Now that we're past all that, let's get to the basic concept of the blog as being a diary. And congratulations, boys! You don't have to feel excluded from something that previously was considered to be a feminine side hobby! You may now post your emo poems and hastily scrawled threats that will never be followed through on, and you don't have to worry about being called a sissy!

Well, unless you refer to yourself as one. I mean, that's a pretty obvious Catch 27. Har har.

I started thinking about this recently when my mind wandered to a friend who is going though a relationship deprogramming. I've decided that I shall never use the term "break-up" ever again. You must change your MySpazz relationship status, so it's just going to be called "Relationship Deprogramming" from now on, OK? Learn to adjust to the additional, um, shit. I'm an English teacher's kid, so I shouldn't forget the term. Syllables? Parables? Preambles? Paraplegics? OK, that was just stupid. But I'm sure you're following along.

I want people to vow to start using their blogs as actual diaries.

Diaries meaning scribing down what they did for the day, the thoughts that occurred. The good shit and the bad. Perhaps a poorly constructed poem that talks about squirrels.

No more opinions. You want those, you should write to your actual newspaper. I've heard they accept emails now for the editorial section. Yes, those things that are wrapped in plastic on your neighbor's lawn that you pass by and wonder why someone would bind up a bulk section of paper and toss it into a stranger's yard. Because, be honest... how many of you really know your neighbor's names anymore? They're all fucking strangers, people.

I am writing this for Lark.

It is getting silly in spots because I'm not entirely sure where I was going with it, and I have a comic book geek who keeps popping in the room and disrupting my train of thought every 5 minutes with updates on which obscure comic book characters are getting made into movies. The last one was Chow Yun Fat in something that was featured as a supposition by Kevin Smith in CHASING AMY.

Point is this: Lark, listen up.

Every day, write in your diary. By that, I mean blog. Pretend that no one is listening. Hell, even start one up at another blogging site and then tell no one about it, make it private and look at it.

Most of us are very rarely away from our computers more than a day at a time anymore. It's not like typing up something simple for our daily experiences would be all that hard.

1) First of all, why the hell did I feel the need to start numbering shit now?

2) Include what you did, where you went, who was there.

3) Notate your general emotion for the day. If the emotion vastly changes between the AM and PM shift switches, make sure to add onto the blog and notate that.

4) Write these simple things EVERY DAY. Even if it's a couple of sentences. Even if it's just a question that's swimming around in your head. (Example: "I feel like a squished dog turd between the tread of a newly purchased pair of running shoes. Where you know the shit is up in there deep and needs to be let to dry, then scraped out with a hard piece of plastic later. I later made myself some popcorn and watched "Lost." Why can't I just disappear onto an island like that?")

5) After you've done this for at least a month, go back to the very beginning and read over what you've written. Look for changes in your emotions and what triggered them. Even if you have to cover your face with your hands and peek between your slightly parted fingers, read every juicy little emo, misspelled detail.

6) Start doing it all over again. Write at least one sentence EVERY DAY. Something. Anything.

7) This is just a notation to let you readers know that I'm done numbering stuff.

I write all kinds of shit all the time. I write emails. I write blogs. I write blurbs. I write movie reviews, sometimes in triplicate and always in different wordings. I write letters to a few surviving souls. I write and I write and I write.

I'm still fucking insane, but whew.... could you imagine the level of monkey-shit crazy I'd be if I didn't write?

*** On a side note: While looking through boxes that are slowly getting delivered to my new place via my mom who seems to want to obliterate any notion of my existence in her house, I have been finding some of my "things." Boxes that went with me, taped up from mom's old house in Oxnard to my first apartment to my second apartment, and on and on until they were back at my mom's house in Oxnard and then the new house in Ventura and now here.

Boxes that have been taped up for... shit, 12 years?

I found diaries, the real ones, the ones with cute pictures and fancy pages, all weathered and slightly brown at the edges.

One of them was from the time that I was 11 years old and my baby sister was born. I shared this with Midget and she laughed about it. Imagining her (almost) 22 year old aunt as a "teeny baby" in my hands as I'd described her in my diary.

I also read on to find telling blurbs about how I felt like Nikki was just the stepping stone to me getting fully ignored by my mom, after Amanda was taking up so much of her time already.

I don't want to get all holistic on you or anything, but it made some sense. Lingering wounds that have never healed. We all have them. It's amazing to discover how simple it is to reopen them, as if over 20 years hadn't developed a thick enough scab to fortify the dam of blood rushing afresh.

We are all broken people, looking for the reasons why. For us girls, finding old diaries helps. But it's never too late to start again with an online one. And it's a hell of a lot easier to remember to write in on a daily basis, with us being online all the time and whatnot.

Well.... except when people throw hissy fits and pull their blog sites down for months.

But, I'm learning to love my scabs and scars and blood like it's rink rash and I'm brave enough to join the roller derby. I am finding that I am the one who participated in creating the pain and I am the only one who can find the will within me to make it heal.

Go find your will.