Several times it has occurred to me that I can type much faster than I can write, and when I'm typing I can go back and edit the things that I write. Many times, when my hands are smeared with gel pen ink and glitter and I'm wasting trees just to jot down my nearly meaningless thoughts and experiences in life, I wonder why I don't just keep my journal here on my blog. My writing quality here is better, everything is more legible, and I could easily back the whole thing up on a little jump drive in case anything ever happened to my blog. So why don't I just do it?
Well I guess the first reason is that I am afraid of putting too much of myself out here on the internet (which is ironic because that's exactly what I'm doing right now heehee). That is the very reason why I don't have a facebook, and why I barely tweet anymore. I like to avoid drama and stay away from being "friends" with the people whom I barely even talk to or care about. Why would I want to look at pictures of people acting stupid at a New Year's Eve party if I don't even know them or care what they do? It's just a place that is asking for drama and rumors to start. Every time a couple gets in a fight, they change their relationship doohickey to "it's complicated" or some other rot, and suddenly the whole world knows that they are not getting along. And then the desperate girls pounce.... It's not that I'm hiding my opinions from the world (obviously, since I post opinions here all the time), I just dont want to wave my every thought around out in the open for begrudging snobs to come and devour.
The second reason would be the fact that there is just something satisfying about writing for hours and getting hand cramps and deciding what color to write in next since the current gel pen is running low on ink. By looking back at the things that I wrote, even years ago, I can tell how I was feeling by the way my handwriting looks. It gets bigger and more smushed together when I am excited to be writing about a good experience, and really dark and scabbly if I'm angry or upset. When I've thought out a good pun to use (yes, I actually use puns in my writing just for fun.....can you spell nerd?) my letters get smaller and neater as I build up to the punch line....and then BOOM! Hilariousness smacks you in the face with a fish. I don't even have to state how I felt when something happened. I can see it in the way that I wrote it. That is something that could hardly be accomplished just by tapping the buttons on a keyboard. That is, unless I suddenly developed really amazingly advanced diction and syntax (yeah AP English w00t.....)
It's also really cool to be able to look back at the what my handwriting has changed over the years. I used to write like a normal kid. Then around seventh grade, I went through a rebellious phase and I wanted to be different. There was a horrid 2 month span when I wrote in nothing but cursive. I actually had to go back and look at my elementary school cursive books and teach myself how to do it, because I had forgotten after so long. Eventually I got sick of that, and I wanted to annoy the crap out of people. So I wrote in all caps, all the time. The letters were capitals and yet they were the size of lowercase letters. The whole effect was really boxy and robot-like, and it was actually really cool. The only downside is, some capital letters are just plain ugly, letters like E and M took a while to write and turned out messy, and I missed making my pretty curvy g's, y's, and t's. So I gradually transitioned to writing some letters in capitals and some lowercase (prettymuch the lowercase letters are the vowels, plus like 9 consonants). And that is the story of the evolution of Amber's mutated and manipulated handwriting. :)
Finally, I have the weird habit of drawing little diagrams of hotel rooms I stay in or odd things I saw in my journals. I just can't do that here! I'd have to draw the picture, have a nuclear battle with my scanner/copier/printer/fax machine/alien spaceship thing to get the picture online, upload, and then what would I do with the original? Throw it away? No! There's no point in all that. I also glue little things into my notebooks; everything from library receipts (I like to out them there so then I don't lose them and forget when the book is due) to movie tickets to maps of amusement parks and old bracelets that broke or got too old and ratty to wear anymore. My Journals are handcrafted time-capsules, full of little pieces of my life that keep the story real. Sure, this blog is special, and I put my heart into it. But I can't glue an actual Nerdfighter note found in an actual library book onto my blog.
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