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memelainaI don't think I had realized that LJ would require polishing off and exposing the different facets of personality that one tends keep in different boxes - showing different sides to different groups of friends and turning other sides away. Today I've been involved in discussions with old friends, with SCA folk, and with people at a Lutheran seminary - not my normally compartmented day. Well, as long as I can keep my corporate world outside of LJ, I suppose I can deal with the rest.
Just creating a list of interests is a kind of internal inspection. What things are important to me? What things define me? What topics do I want to discuss, which do I want to avoid?
I started keeping a journal when I was ten and in sixth grade. I continued on an occasional basis until thirteen, at which point I continued on a daily basis through high school and college, then dropping back to occasional entries. There have been periods when I wrote more and periods when I wrote less. But I always wrote for myself alone, so there's a different (more mature?) feel to writing a public journal.
Perhaps I began to be interested in that public side of journal writing when I was gifted with a book called Private Pages for Christmas a number of years ago. It's a women's history book that has collected girls' journals from various era's of American history. I began to wonder what my 1960s journals would say about life in middle America to someone reading them a hundred years later - even 50 years later, and that's not so far in the future. Jill Ker Conway was one of the editors of Private Pages and reading that book started me reading her autobiographical books, The Road from Coorain, True North, and A Woman's Education. I'd like to think that someday I could write something that drew meaning from my American experience in the way that she has drawn on her Australian and Canadian one.
Is it part of the American experience to have a "couch room" and a "chair room" instead of a living room and a family room? My in-laws are in the process of moving from their home in Iowa to a smaller condo in Las Vegas where they need never shovel snow again. Part of this process involved my husband and I flying to Iowa and driving home a van full of furniture that they want us to have. So now there is this enormous glassed china cabinet in my small dining-L (the only small part of my entire house) and a huge "davenport" with a queen-sized bed folded up inside in the middle of my living room. All the chairs will have to go into the TV room and I'll end up with three couches all facing each other around the sides of what used to be the living room and is now the couch room. Conspicuous consumption - it must be American. But at least I maintain a non-American insistance on NOT having a television in my couch room. I'd rather go without a TV entirely (and miss Jeopardy and West Wing!) than have the television encroaching on a room designed for reading and conversation.
So the LJ question of the day is - shall I keep my identity photo intact? Or replace it with a more recent photo? I like that photo of myself at 18. I think I still see myself that way. And anyway, surely no one who knows me now would possibly identify me by looking at it. Whatcha think?
Just creating a list of interests is a kind of internal inspection. What things are important to me? What things define me? What topics do I want to discuss, which do I want to avoid?
I started keeping a journal when I was ten and in sixth grade. I continued on an occasional basis until thirteen, at which point I continued on a daily basis through high school and college, then dropping back to occasional entries. There have been periods when I wrote more and periods when I wrote less. But I always wrote for myself alone, so there's a different (more mature?) feel to writing a public journal.
Perhaps I began to be interested in that public side of journal writing when I was gifted with a book called Private Pages for Christmas a number of years ago. It's a women's history book that has collected girls' journals from various era's of American history. I began to wonder what my 1960s journals would say about life in middle America to someone reading them a hundred years later - even 50 years later, and that's not so far in the future. Jill Ker Conway was one of the editors of Private Pages and reading that book started me reading her autobiographical books, The Road from Coorain, True North, and A Woman's Education. I'd like to think that someday I could write something that drew meaning from my American experience in the way that she has drawn on her Australian and Canadian one.
Is it part of the American experience to have a "couch room" and a "chair room" instead of a living room and a family room? My in-laws are in the process of moving from their home in Iowa to a smaller condo in Las Vegas where they need never shovel snow again. Part of this process involved my husband and I flying to Iowa and driving home a van full of furniture that they want us to have. So now there is this enormous glassed china cabinet in my small dining-L (the only small part of my entire house) and a huge "davenport" with a queen-sized bed folded up inside in the middle of my living room. All the chairs will have to go into the TV room and I'll end up with three couches all facing each other around the sides of what used to be the living room and is now the couch room. Conspicuous consumption - it must be American. But at least I maintain a non-American insistance on NOT having a television in my couch room. I'd rather go without a TV entirely (and miss Jeopardy and West Wing!) than have the television encroaching on a room designed for reading and conversation.
So the LJ question of the day is - shall I keep my identity photo intact? Or replace it with a more recent photo? I like that photo of myself at 18. I think I still see myself that way. And anyway, surely no one who knows me now would possibly identify me by looking at it. Whatcha think?
