do you remember when..

[dragonessie]

Today was a day of beginnings...

No, I didn't start anything, I just wandered through the journals of each person in my FList and looked waaaaay back to their very first entry. And added all of 'em to my memories. Of course.. they're only veiwable to people on my Friends List, to make things more complicated ;-)

(for some reason though, I couldn't see unpoedic's first entry... ah well)

Comments

[unpoedic.livejournal.com]

Did I introduce myself? I am "oldfashionedgirl" from the RI (twenty-one and very dull), and had followed your LJ for some time before evidencing this fact. And you, you are the impressive creature with the Great Expectations name. ;)

At the start of my LJ venture I attempted to read Friend's journals in entirety in efforts to know them, from the beginning. I never read through one. Just as I can never begin to know the heights of these people.

My own entries have been shut up for some while now as for whatever reason (mostly a wish to conceal my hideous manner of writing, worse then—don't laugh) I do not care to keep them exposed. But, I have undertaken to let you at least read what is locked away, for I too have been in the place to wonder. ;)

My initial entry, as cross-posted from what was then my primary weblog:

4 July 2003

Look, Ma, no grey!

Capricious—the word I bunged up before a modest assembly of one hundred¹; my word, consequently, as if tandem bicycles were made for us. It is a congruous relationship, contradictory to the old adage, "opposites attract" because we embody the same aspects; capricious imports the idea of being "characterized by or subject to whim," and I provide the live demonstration. It is by impulse that I take up this virtual pen, on a whim that of an indefinite number of layouts pecked out at random over months and scrapped within minutes, this array meets with my present standard of what is suitable, perhaps even aesthetically pleasing, from a cross-eyed perspective.

Odd how creativity can assume tsunami form and we ooze possibility from the seams; while other days, ordinary days, creativity hops a flight to see its mother on the East coast...and never calls, never writes, never sends flowers. It is not something to be relegated, blue gel that builds up in the back of the skull at varying rates to be released at will.

Three winters ago I cast off from blogging with the forewarning, "see you on the flip side of disaster," and it seems the breeze didn't waft me far enough. Admittedly, abstinence from this form of thought broadcast was exonerating: there is rest for the lungs in giving up a wind chase.

Maybe you have noted by now my pursuit of perfection, how entries made in Mr. Hyde hours are soon after met with frantic rebuttal from Dr. Jekyll; how I am my own unrelenting critic, &tc. Not always: at times words glide into their place, hardly a grunt required; a diverse vocabulary flexes itself, the I's oversleep that morning, and all's right with the literary spew of one writer wannabe.

But this is the exception rather than the rule. More often I deliberate and struggle over phrasing, how to tweak what is said to relay what I intended, never achieving the original in-house composition. Does this sentence make a valid contribution to the conversation? What is likely to be derived in the use of this word? Does this dress make me look fat? The opening few sentences of this post called for several rewrites, and even now, five paragraphs in, I will edit, and edit, and (you know the rest). It borders on obsessive, and for the lame purpose of fending off ridicule that is imagined; because I take too seriously how people perceive me. I might attest that being a neurotic nitpicker is good habit; I am, after all, honing my grammar. But the sorry gist of it is pride.

(Now we are shy, my Precious; we wants to delete, delete!)

The proverbial Blank Page has two customary views from my angle, one of vulnerability, the other a blood-relation to new snow, that untainted patch of ground meant to look at. Here, now, I am hurried enough that eraser marks begin to give the landscape character, put hair on its chest.

Meanwhile, et voila, winked back into existence.



__________
¹  a small nation from the standpoint of a battered ego