Some meta-diaries: People, which is seemingly affiliated in some way with i, anomalous. Plus, there's the Diaryland web awards. There's even a meta-meta diary that points to all the meta diaries. Groan. Diaryland may be populist, but I don't think that the majority of the people there suck. In fact, I've seen their list of who they think is "cool." Please. I think I described some of their preferred reads to Crafty as "Seinfeld episodes on cocaine." No accounting for taste, I guess. A couple of my quasi-regular reads (I don't do anything on schedule) show up in the bottom rung. They didn't get good reviews. Imagine that. Too bad they don't review me. It'd be entertaining. I don't even care what they say, as long as I get a link. There's no such thing as bad publicity, baby.

I discovered a phenomenon that I'd theorized about in this vein, but never thought would come about because I thought it wasn't worth the effort.

Apparently somebody else thought it was, though, because somebody actually writes them. They call 'em "meta-diaries."

A meta-diary is a diary about other peoples' diaries. They review (or rather, criticize) other diaries, categorize them, write catty things about them or fawn all over them, gossip, question veracity and so forth. Often they're collaborative projects, or even anonymous. Some have collaborative aspects, like webboards or what have you.

I guess it's a form of weblog. Links. Metacontent. Commentary, after a fashion.

The thing with online journals is that there is a serious level of incestuousness going on. Probably around half the readers are other writers of online journals. It's hard to separate out the creators from the fans, since they tend to be one in the same. Thus, also, the intermediaries are the exact same group, by and large.

Oddly enough, I think that mailing lists like diary-l and journals fill the role of intermediaries, actually. People are there who want to talk about journals, journaling, web design, writers' block, food traditions on New Year's, bad erotica... well, topic drift is the norm, unfortunately. I am truly going to wonder what an anthropologist would ever make of the mailing list archives if someone ever writes a tract on exscribitionists.

I think that meta-diaries are the parodists of the medium. Sure, they link to diaries, and links are the coin and parcel of the web, and yeah, they may be useful to some readers, especially those with bad attitudes and axes to grind. But more or less, I think they're just another form of running people down for no good reason while holding up some friends or some people that are supposed to be oh-so-cool.

Yawn.

I think what they have yet to understand is that a lot of people write for themselves, and they happen to let people look in on their lives. Who is anyone to judge anybody else and their lives? Shoot, I'll admit, for the most part my journal isn't very interesting to the vast majority of people. It's not meant to be, because it exists to be what it is: a journal. I'm okay with that.

I mean, let's be serious. If I were living the life I'd like to be, and was headed towards (well, once, anyway), I'd probably be even more boring. My days right now would probably be spent teaching some lower-level math, physics or computer science course to disinterested undergrads, staring at a piece of paper or a computer screen working at the lunatic fringe side of string theory or supersymmetry (wait, isn't supersymmetry considered the lunatic fringe, anyway?) and leading a quiet home life. I'd have even fewer readers than I do now.

This, of course, in contrast to my alternate reality of a preferable life, where I am working twenty-hour days at my startup coding or wiring up some piece of crap that nobody probably really needs in the hopes that I can IPO and cash out quick and then do... who knows what. Still, probably not terribly interesting.

They would counter that people who write in a public medium must be writing for an audience, or should at least expect one. This much is true, but if you don't agree with someone's lifestyle, decisions or choice of doing or sharing something to entertain you or appeal to your voyeuristic side then just don't read them. Don't link them. Sure, it's a value judgement, but it can be extremely hurtful to some writers to get reviewed badly. Some people don't suck it up very well.

Let people try to join webrings and cliques and 'burb, and if they get turned down, so be it, but at least that's opt-in (yes, I know some folks opt-into being listed/reviewed in meta-diaries). It just seems to me that there is enough bitterness and pain in the world, so why spread it around for no reason? Then again, maybe that's what I'm doing here, bitching about the whole idea of meta-diaries. Yeah, well, as the guy said, if I contradict myself, so be it. I contain multitudes.

Intermission:

"Hey, why was your journal down last Friday and today during the day?"

Simple enough - I was boneheaded.

Friday I got a cute cartoon in my email from somebody, and I decided to share it with Moogie. I drop it into an email, hit send and go into the bathroom to get a shower.

It wasn't until about fifteen minutes after I got out of the shower that I realized that I'd sent it from my [email protected] address, which, oddly enough, has the URL to this journal in the signature block.

Ohshitohshitohshit.

Fly to my viewer statistics, I think. They take an agonizingly long time to load, but I eventually discover that no visitors from her agency have visited my site.

Okay, I need to take this down.

A few file and directory renamings, a new explanation page (that was edited about four times), javascript and meta tag redirects and a dummy front entry later, I feel okay enough.

So, I call Moogie. "Hey, did you get a cartoon in email from me?"

"No. Why?"

"Well, I sent one, I wondered."

"Well, I have Lotus Notes open, and it hasn't told me I have new mail."

"Okay, let me send it again." This time I send it with one of my other addresses that doesn't have the offending .sig block.

I keep watching my stats, and no unexpected visitors. However, this didn't mean the coast was clear. Once she got home, I put the site back up, but realized I'd have to take it back down Monday in case my ISP's SMTP server had a hiccup and sends the message over the weekend.

So, again, Monday, I took the site down, and again, got no surprise visitors. Declaring victory, I put the site back up. So let's cross our fingers.

Act two:

My mind is back into the mode where the rushing, conflicting thoughts are the primary feature. The thoughts howl for my attention, I feel pulled in every direction, it exhausts me, it makes me angry with myself for having so little control over my mind.

The only tools I have ever found that control it are outside my grasp because I don't want to just turn myself off with sleep, and I can't really afford and am not interested in getting into something completely new and novel. I want it to just stop and let me get on with my life.

It's causing serious problems with Gurugrrl. She knows it's there, she's seen it, lived through it before, even pointed it out, but it's wearing thin with her (like it's not with me, right?). We're coming to angry words and upset from it quite a bit, because with the thoughts come insecurity and Mr. Paranoia.

It's a self-destructive pattern. I've seen it happen over and over again. I remember when it first started to occur. I'd be talking to Geegee, holding a phone conversation, doing something on the computer and watching TV at the same time. She just thought I was good at multitasking or something. Once I was; maybe it was a milder form that I had under my thumb and could direct.

But after a while it got way out of control. I'd start talking about a half dozen things at once, jumping between the conversations, threading them strangely, finding common themes and coming up with weird ideas and finding humor in how they interacted. It was a scary dance to watch, I'm sure. She'd come up behind me, kiss me on the cheek and say that familiar, "there you go a-gain." She thought it was cute; I held my head in my hands and privately wondered how long until I lost my mind completely.

I would avoid starting friendships with people over it, lest it weird them out. I spent more time trying to control my thoughts than to accomplish anything else. I became angry all the time. Things fell apart.

I have been through a lot of relationships over it since then, including people I tried to get really close to. It's the same pattern, over and over. I feel powerless to affect it because it's bigger and a whole lot meaner than I am. It's tiring.

Yeah, I'm trying to straighten things out, here, I thought to myself. If you just want to go, then fine, let's just go. Fuck it. "Okay, let's just go. Sorry. Goodnight."

Gurugrrl's reply: "Goodnight." And she left. Short and to the point. I don't really blame her, we've been on this for days, it was late, and she had to go to work the next morning.For days I'd had something on my mind, and when I finally broached the subject (at the wrong moment), she reacted badly (because I approached it the wrong way). This didn't keep me from being pissed off, mind you, just as sometimes it doesn't stop her from being pissed when the shoe's on the other foot. I had a short screaming session in my head, finished up a couple things I had to do, and headed to bed.

Now, ever had one of those times where you start to drift off, and you're in that half-awake, half-asleep state where your thoughts start to drift off? You begin to dream, but they're dreams that make no sense whatsoever. If you wake up during this time, at most only a few minutes after you've drifted off, you can't really remember much more than the theme of what you were dreaming about.

Well, I discovered it has an interesting by-product. My mind was remarkably clear. None of the racing thoughts, upset or anger remained.

Of course, I immediately thought about Gurugrrl, and how I feel about her deep down shined through, rather than the confusion and upset. The love and caring and qualities that endear her to me came out with none of the horrible by-products.

It never seemed 100% obvious to me that a lot of the bad things I felt, and probably that she feels also, are from the inside, not an expression of outside stimuli. This is weird, but when things are going okay, they're really good, and when they're going poorly, well... Sigh.

So as I am wont to do late at night, I decided to drop her an email to let her know.

Of course, what sucks is that twenty minutes after I'd been awake the next morning, the thoughts, paranoia and anger all came rushing back. Confusingly enough, they were mixed with all the feelings from the night before. (It's so much fun to have factions of your mind screaming at the others.)

Gurugrrl took the evening away tonight to think and sleep, which is reasonable enough. I think some time away did me some good, too, despite the fact that I wanted to call pretty badly.

I have managed to sort out a few things, at least, if not the whole shebang. Even though I realize that a lot of the anger comes from inside, I am also wondering if we're not good for each other. I'm tired of us both being stressed out a lot of the time, and couple this with the fact that I really want a serious, intimate relationship.

It's that distance thing. That's all.

I want things to get back to the way they were, but I'm not holding my breath that they are ever going back there or not. I've begun to make my peace with the idea that it may be necessary for both of us to just give up and walk away, although I don't want that.

Gurugrrl does say I shouldn't be making any decisions based on her. Well, okay... I won't, I guess. I take this as a sign that she's coming to a point of coming to ease with letting go, herself.

It only makes it stranger, still, because she gets pissed off with me when I start talking about one of us giving up or reassessing the situation, or what have you. I'm not sure where to go anymore.

Then again, maybe I'm overreacting. I'm having bad relationships with everybody right now. Make no rash decisions and ride this out, and everything should be okay on the other side.

Thus, I'm not pushing anymore. I'm going to leave it alone, and leave the ball on her side of the court. If she doesn't serve it back, then maybe it's easiest this way. If she does, then we have the understanding to compromise on things that will make this relationship successful. It's what I want.

In the mean time, I will focus on doing the things I need to do, and make no decisions based on her. [frown]

restlessmind