A Blog By Any Other Name

I have never been able to keep a successful journal. I've tried, but I'm just no good at it. I make notes but I wouldn't call that a journal.

A journal is something like pseudo praying. I came to that realization one night when I was about 11 or 12, trying to engage in something I would have called prayer at the time. I suddenly understood that I was simply talking to myself. I wasn't doing what I think would be theologically understood as prayer. It wasn't meditative in a religious way; it was just me talking to myself. That's what a journal is. Talking to oneself.

My medium of communication used to be letter writing, until the advent of email. When email first emerged I would write emails in the same way I would write letters.

An email is supposed to be succinct, not the equivalent of my four page, longhand letters. People would tell me that I shouldn't write long emails. So I continued to write letters that I sent through the mail until typing on a keyboard supplanted my ability to script. Now, I am ashamed to say, unless it is a letter of condolence or a birthday card to a dear friend, I rarely write in longhand. I email.

The blog medium trumps the journal in that it is, in its cyberspace way, personal -- should one wish it to be -- or public -- should one make that choice instead. Or more correctly, not either/or but a combination of the two.

The public aspect of the web log means that, if one has any sense at all, content is consciously censored for the public view, unlike a tell-all private journal. I find that to be a wonderful challenge, for even if no one ever reads a blog, it must be, from my point of view, edited, censored, thoughtfully conceived.

I have used "one" throughout here as a first person singular as opposed to the more commonly used "you." I don't like "you" in English because "you" makes no differentiation between"you" singular and "you" plural. English speakers, depending on their geographic dialect, try to correct for this. In the south, people say "you all" or the elided "y'all." In southwestern Pennsylvania the solution has become "younns" [spoken -- no idea how it should be spelled out].