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November 29, 2001: Left out and friendless and somewhat loserish

More thoughts on journal-enjoyability: I get excited when I read a journal by someone whose life I am curious about. (This is, as Rob might say, something of a no-shitter.) If I find a journal by someone who is a teacher, I get all excited. I think, ooh, I hope they talk about how their classes are, and how they motivate and excite their students, because those are things I'm interested in and curious about. I'd love to find a journal by a professional classical singer (or even an instrumentalist) because I'm very curious about what the day to day life of a musician is like.

In fact, as I was writing this I was also reading a journal called My Incredibly Unremarkable Life. My first impression was, yeah yeah, here's your to-do list. Then I realized the writer is a teacher. *perk* Oooh, that's interesting! Then I realized she is 65 years old. Oh, wow! That's different; maybe there's a new perspective here. I'm interested in journals of potential role models: musicians, older women, mothers.

In that sense, I can't really control whether my journal is interesting to you or not; if you want to know about the life of a recently married twenty-something aspiring musician working in the software business, then you'll be interested. If you don't, then you're screwed because that seems to describe most of the journals out there.

One thing that I can control is voice. Some of the journals that I like (Rob, an bei, Gwen) are notable for their smart-assy tone. This is a dilemma, though; on the one hand, I could assume a similar tone, and be amusing. On the other, that would be annoying and poserish and I bet if I were trying really hard to be amusing, I wouldn't be.

I don't know how well I write. For the most part my writing seems rather flat to me. I try and clean it up, getting rid of extraneous words and making it snappier, but it doesn't seem to have the zing that I read in other journals. It's just yammer yammer yammer. Someday I will go back through my archives, determine what the entries I like have in common, and try and bring out those qualities in my prose.

Acanit stopped writing. What a pisser. I was really looking forward to reading all about her and her new relationship, and how she's adjusting to life in Minnesota, and whether she got a job, and stuff. She has such a great eye for detail and her sparkling prose brought her stories to life. But no more.

I wrote her a long stupid email yesterday about some stuff she said, just some dorky chatty stuff. I hope that didn't have anything to do with her quitting. I know that's such an incredibly self-centered thing to say, but I can just see it: Christ almighty, (or whatever formerly-Muslims say) if writing a journal means I'll have to put up with getting reams of this crap in my inbox, I've had it. Life's too short. I guess that's probably not what happened, but...

I'm feeling left out and friendless and somewhat loserish today. Remember yesterday, when I talked about how I don't need to be part of the cool kids and I don't care if no-one reads my journal? Not as true as I would like it to be.

After I posted that stuff about only having two readers (or maybe not even that) I kinda secretly hoped I'd get a letter or two saying, Hey, yeah, I read your journal too. But there was nothing in my inbox today. Twinge of disappointment.

Then I went to The Usual Suspects, where I haven't posted for a while, kinda secretly hoping (again) that someone would say, Hey, I haven't heard from amiable for a while. Nada. Of course; I never said anything really interesting there, but I expected my inate charm to shine through my posts and intrigue everyone. Hah.

And then Acanit quit, and I was going to send her a last email saying Good luck, or something, but she took off the link to her email address, and I thought, yah, no shit she doesn't want to hear from your chattering self anymore.

Then I got to thinking how I never quite seem to manage to strike up a relationship on the net with anyone. Rob and Jessamyn have their story of how Jessamyn read Rob's journal, and wrote him email, and he was so impressed with her wit and writing skill that he encouraged her to start a journal of her own. Acanit has her story about Isabel, for heaven's sake. Lots of journallers talk about how they've become friends with readers or other journallers.

I, on the other hand. I've written to Rob (for example) and he hardly seemed impressed enough to write back, let alone strike up a conversation.

When I started writing this journal, I got a couple of emails from my two then-readers. (That's what got my head all swelled; I'd only been writing a week and I got two (2!) letters in one day. I thought it would always be like that.) I wrote back a couple of times, and then... nothing. No striking up of conversations, no interesting dialogues, no new friendships forged.

Does this making-friends-on-the-internet thing only happen to other people? Is there something about how I write email that puts people off? Or is everyone simply busy and not looking for new 'net friends?

When I first started writing email to my then-best friend (after knowing her for a few years), she asked me if I was always in a bad mood when I wrote to her. I said no, that's just the way I write. I chalked it up to the fact that I don't use a lot of smileys and ellipses, and that I try and write grammatically correctly. I figured my writing comes off as formal and that might be what bothers her. But maybe it's more than that?

On the other hand, I met one of my dearest friends by email, years ago. So I don't make a uniformly bad impression. Or at least, I didn't used to.

Am I, in fact, a loser for wanting to make friends on the 'net? Am I being needy and whiney and should I just shut up before I alienate my last reader? (Blake, you'll always read my journal, right?) I know that whining about how you don't have any friends is the number one way to drive people away, so I won't do it any more, I promise.

Feh, here I am getting all drizzly and sad because the internet doesn't like me, when I've got a lovely husband and a niceish job and a few good real-life friends, and I live comfortably, in the best country in the world. Fie on me.