Hardly Cringe* Worthy

The great part about keeping a journal is that you can write anything you want to or need to without fear of censure or hurting someone's feelings. You can put your most closely held desires on paper, acknowledging them without putting them up to the scrutiny of others. You can ease the burdens of painful experiences by letting part of them go in a safe place.

With daily or almost daily journaling, you can date important events in your life for later and get a glimpse of yourself in your younger days. You can see the way you wrote, how you felt about things and because it's you reading words you wrote, you can almost step back in time and remember what that felt like.

But when you keep a Livejournal and you invite others to read it and you submit your journal for review, you lose most of these wonderful things. You also seek attention or validation for things that are never going to be interesting to other people. Unless your life is truly fascinating or you write exceptionally well, someone else's journal is mealy meat loaf, tinny tasting overcooked greenbeans and tuna casserole. It might be food but it's not a meal. It's like the three-recipe repertoire homecook trying to compete along side the Iron Chef, sure it's not in the ballpark, but really it's not even the same game.

Now many writers who keep blogs, chronicle parts of their lives in a way that's akin to journaling but we read them because of their humor or eloquence or ability to perfectly capture something we have felt or experienced. We read them because they have a knack for storytelling and can spin nearly anything into an entertaining tale. There are also some people who use their blogs almost exclusively for journaling and maybe they aren't natural storytellers but they have a highly compelling individual story, no matter how it's told. So what do you have when you have a journal keeper who lacks specific writing talent absent a compelling story? You have Crazy Stuff in My Head.

I won't soften it, I don't like this blog. One reason is Livejournal which just feels to me like a handful of the worst of Myspace and Facebook without their better features. Did you know that Livejournal's mascot is Frank the goat? Well, Miss Missives wants to kick Frank in the teeth. I cannot link to anything specific here because the entries don't have their own page. Frankly, it doesn't matter because none of the entries are written for a larger audience. The topics are mundane and the writing is cursory and thoughtless. There is also very little information about the journal keeper adding another difficulty in connecting with this material in any way.

Now I'm not suggesting that she shouldn't keep a journal or that it lacks any purpose or meaning, only that this particular journal is important to only one person and interesting to maybe seven more. She shouldn't stop writing the mundane, everyday happenings of her life just stop looking for reader's or stranger's approval.

As for the space itself, it needs a header. The whole thing is very nondescript, much like the writing. The font is too small but the space is spare and the sidebar relatively clean. This whole thing feels like your mom's tuna casserole. If she's your mom, yeah, you'll eat it but you would never ask for the recipe, pass it along, order it out and you're definitely not having seconds.

For you, a trifecta.







*Cringe is an open mic reading series where brave souls come forward and read aloud from their teenage diaries, journals, notes, letters, poems, abandoned rock operas, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence.