I finished (re-)posting all my old web-diary entries from ‘97 and ‘98.  The famous (?) diaries that I ended up yanking down with no forewarning, just before Telescopic was released… I’ve posted them again because, well, it’s five years later and I guess they don’t bother me as much as they used to.  The diary thing ran from around 8/24/97 through 10/16/98, first on my old site at Enteract and later at Tripod. (I’d done site update and newsy-type pages before that but had never called it a diary.) There was no such thing as blogging software back then; I did everything by hand.  Life is SO much easier now!

The diary raised a few eyebrows, and even makes me cringe a lot now because it seems all I could think about at the time was boys, boys, boys.  That’s just not me, or anyway it’s a side of me that I don’t really like so much. And the way I went on and on about one guy in particular is something I would never EVER do again (the poor bartender guy). But it was just a phase… what you missed in the story is that almost immediately after I quit posting that stuff, I started dating John Whitney seriously, and all that mental commotion evaporated.  He was the one! It’s actually a great feeling now, to read my old description of the perfect imaginary man… I forget which post, but it was VERY specific, and it fits John to a tee. I’m really lucky.  :-)

Why did I pull the plug, anyway? Well, I just got sick of it.  I’d been planning to stop doing it for some time but I didn’t want to give any advance warnings. I didn’t want anybody to think they should save a copy to their hard drive or anything like that.  See, the world was not full of bloggers back then — there was no word ‘blogger’, I was an online journal-keeper and there weren’t that many of us.  It was a huge novelty for my more voyeuristic readers. For that whole year, I felt like I was living under a microscope.  I was getting weird e-mails and even had a phone-stalker at one point.  I began to realize that I couldn’t go on publicly describing my personal life in such minute detail.  Some of my friends were getting pretty sick of it too!  I don’t think it’s such a big deal nowadays though, thank goodness.  And like I said I just wouldn’t be posting the kinds of things that I used to back then.  Close, but not quite.

So if I stopped, why did I start it up again? Because I missed the good aspects of keeping my visitors in touch with what I was doing (or not!).  It’s a lot easier for me now.  I’m not sure if it’s the just the times (more bloggers = less conspicuous?) or maybe I’ve just gotten a lot better at knowing what I can live with and what I can’t.  I don’t write the way I used to because I really wouldn’t want to.  If you were reading at the time you probably understood why I yanked it. I just didn’t know the limits back then, whereas now it’s a topic that’s been discussed ad nauseum. Where do you draw the line in deciding what to post and what not to post?  You just watch your ass, that’s all.  Things come back to haunt you and if you say things you end up regretting, you have to pull that shit offline.

With that in mind I have to say that I did do a teeny bit of editing on the old posts.  But only a couple of paragraphs here and there, like to X out someone’s old employer name, or the times I ranted about my ex-husband. I don’t want that shit online so I reserve the right not to have them here in my blog.  Limits!  :-)