tuesday, 17 april 2001 | 11:09 am

so i wrote this long entry yesterday but i ended up keeping it offline. there are some things i want to say that i can’t really say in public. i’ve been feeling that a lot lately, actually, so i’m thinking of starting another paper journal, just for myself. i haven’t had a physical journal since high school; i used to have them all the time, and i had a stack of notebooks i filled from when i was thirteen until when i was eighteen, but they acciendtally got thrown out. that really, really depressed me. they had meant a lot to me and the idea of them being just gone was not easy to deal with. so i stopped keeping a paper journal and started this one instead.

the thing is though, as i’m sure you’ve realized if you’ve read a few entires, that while this is a journal in a sense, it’s also heavily edited. i have to think of my audience. unlike a paper journal, i’m not the only one who’s going to be reading it. frequently the people i mention in it are also people who read it, and then of course there’s my parents and everything. so i just can’t be as candid as i want to be. i know of a few people who sort of solved that problem by only giving out the addresses of their journals to a few people, or making them password protected, or something. but that seems to me sort of lame. if you’re putting it on the web, it’s public. you have to assume that. you can’t control who reads it; the address will get to those you don’t want it to and the password will be given out and everything. so to me it’s either assume everyone is reading it or no one is. in the case of middlegrey, of course, i have to assume everyone is. but i think i might like to keep a separate journal for myself. i miss having that privacy, that freedom of candor and expression. there’s also something to be said for the physicality of a paper journal - having a notebook that can be carried around and reread is something in itself. there’s something very appealing about paper that’s been written on. i know that sounds odd. but anyway.

so yeah, yesterday’s entry is going to be one for my private journal, i think. in future i’ll keep the two separate rather than doing one or the other, don’t worry.