2000-10-20

Blah again

So, Diaryland's all like, "Add these amazing things to your diary! Enhance your overall Diaryland experience!"

Guestbooks. "Notify Lists."

Blah blah blah.

Here's the thing with me and guestbooks, slambooks, notify lists and webrings: I can't do 'em. It's not as if I have anything against them per se, it's just that I've recently come to terms with the fact that I am a demented, pathetic freak who has the potential to become all-too-reliant upon these "trimmings," as it were, to gauge my value as a diarist or what-have-you.

Popularity does matter to me, to a ridiculous degree. I would spend every free second I have obsessing over why Joe Shmoe from hipster.com only spent 2 minutes and 34 seconds on my site if I hadn't made the decision to just say no to the trappings of the private-yet-really-really-public-online-diarist. In the year and 5 days that I've been up-and-running here, I've signed on to several webrings, attached countless web counters and guestbooks, and it hasn't made me a better writer, nor has it made me the Most Popular Girl in Diaryland.

It's a slippery slope I inhabit here, where I ultimately don't care much about who reads this (my immediate family, my husband, my mother-in-law, my bandmates and my two best friends tune in on a regular basis, but I've never kept much from them to begin with), but at the same time I do feel as if I have an obligation to present myself in the Best Possible Light to anyone who may stumble across this for the first time. Like, I believe that anyone who's read this for long enough knows that I have some self-esteem issues, that I probably drink too much on school nights and that any disparaging remark I make about someone else is usually balanced out by an admission about myself that's equally as unsavory.

I don't know what I'm getting at here. I was invited to join a webring, and I turned the invitation down, saying that while I have nothing against webrings, I've just decided that they're not for me.

I promise that I'll stop with the cheesey introspective bile soon enough. It doesn't become me, I know.

lisamcc at 03:32:00

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