I’m HERE!

Well, aren’t I a lem­ming? I final­ly start­ed my own Live­Jour­nal. I had­n’t real­ly paid much atten­tion to them until the last week, and then I found read­ing them all too addictive.

I’ve long said that the web is the world’s biggest van­i­ty press, and I guess LJ is a log­i­cal step when you look at it that way. Peo­ple can bare their souls here with­out ever hav­ing to think about cre­at­ing a website—it’s just there!

Some of the things some peo­ple tell, though—well, they fall into a cat­e­go­ry that’s well beyond TMI as far as I’m con­cerned. They’re way over into BUS (as in “not only did I not want to go there, I did­n’t want to know that the bus goes there.”)

Then again, as far as some folks (like, oh, my fam­i­ly of ori­gin) are con­cerned, the idea of any­body pub­lish­ing any­thing about them­selves on the web, here or else­where, or even dis­cussing any aspect of their lives on a mail­ing list or news­group is so com­plete­ly for­eign that they can’t con­ceive of it. It’s darn near a fetish, a form of exhi­bi­tion­ism, and any­body who’d read that stuff is a voyeur. 

I don’t think it’s an issue of age — my sib­lings are younger than I am and share my par­ents’ view. Maybe it’s one of those areas where those who are heavy inter­net users are just going to be com­plete­ly divid­ed from those who do noth­ing more than send­ing emails to fam­i­ly and friends. They’re very Real­i­ty-cen­tric. The idea of com­mu­ni­cat­ing with any­one you don’t know and see reg­u­lar­ly in the flesh is sim­ply for­eign to them. Con­sid­er­ing some­one you met online a friend is just — out there. Not done. Weird.

But I’m used to being The Weird One in my fam­i­ly. I love them, but we have so very lit­tle in com­mon that I often won­der where I came from. I know that one of the biggest rea­sons for those dif­fer­ences is my love of read­ing. As soon as I could read, I was read­ing every­thing I could get my hands on, and it opened new worlds to me. It exposed me to ideas that my par­ents and sib­lings did­n’t encounter dur­ing their for­ma­tive years, and to which they’d nev­er give a momen­t’s thought now.

Any­way, I plan to use my LJ for doing some “think­ing out loud.” I can’t see myself giv­ing out incred­i­bly inti­mate details of my life, but my def­i­n­i­tion of that prob­a­bly dif­fers from some peo­ple’s def­i­n­i­tions. On one hand, I’d say that my mus­ings are unlike­ly to be of any inter­est to most peo­ple, but then again—I spent a whole lot of time read­ing through entries made by peo­ple I don’t know and with whom I’m unlike­ly to ever cor­re­spond, so maybe that streak of voyeurism is more com­mon than any of us like to admit.