Why I Need Another Blog

I've had a livejournal for something like six years- well, kinda multiple livejournals: one (here: illscientist.livejournal.com) where I was like, I am a boy! I work at an insurance company, so instead of doing work, I'm going to make up and post fake interviews with bands I don't like. And then another (here: all_summer.livejournal.com) that was like, this is a top secret space for me to process the shit out of all these feelings I have about gender, except some top secret people are allowed to read it. Then, even later, after talking about that stuff became mundane and less scary, and also I figured out that the problem the whole time was that I was a girl, I got bored with both of those livejournals. I squished 'em together to make my last current livejournal (here: jnnogen.livejournal.com), which I've been using pretty consistently for, I don't know, three or four years?

And before that, oh man, back in the hazy fogs of the days when I was communicating VERY SERIOUS FEELINGS across the internet without a livejournal, I had a geocities website- which has been taken down, i think, or I'd link it- that I coded all by hand and on which I had my drunkest, weepiest, most dramatic blog of all. That one was nice, it was all, no! no! no! here is a litany of reasons why I can't possibly be a transsexual!

Adorable.

Anyway, you know the stereotype about livejournal being for fourteen-year-olds? I've always felt like that was pretty unfair, kind of like the stereotype that fourteen-year-olds are all paralyzingly immature. But I guess it's seeped into my consciousness after all, because I realized that lately all I'd been using livejournal for was, like, pretending I'd gotten a copy of the new Harry Potter book ahead of time so I could make dumb stuff up, or moping inarticulately about feelings. Or cussing. All of which is important and valid, it's just like, I do this thing where I validate the amount of time I spend looking at a computer- which is a lot- by calling it trans activism, e.g. by saying "as an out transwoman on the internet, making stupid jokes and cussing shows that transsexual women can make stupid jokes and cuss on the internet just like anybody. It contradicts oppressive media stereotyping and is punk rock!" Which, y'know, there's no good argument against that. It's pretty convenient! It's just that, also, there's lots of pointless self-indulgence going on.

Livejournal feels stale. It's this paradigm that I'm so used to, it doesn't feel productive to work in it any more. Y'know? I used to have a date who said she wanted a love so intense that she didn't even see the person any more: they'd disappeared, become effortless internalized, whatever. I never got it. I always felt like, when you stop seeing somebody and love becomes automatic, then isn't it kind of pretty much gone? Not that I am or ever was in love with livejournal; it just feels so comfortable to call Dumbledore a fag to at least a hundred and eighty people over there, which is weird and not productive. Boring. Rote? Sure, whatever.

I come from a weird time, because I was in college from 1997 to 2002. When I got there, man, I knew about the internet, and folks knew of the internet, but it was a year or two before everybody had an e-mail address, and, what, three or four before everybody was on Friendster. Y'know. The only reason I knew anything about the internet was because I was transsexual and didn't want to own up to it and the anonymity of this computer thing I'd heard about was super appealing: I knew that if I could just get online by myself I'd find a supportive community and everything would be brilliant. (What I found was a community of people masturbating furiously, but I'll tell you my coming out story later.)

The point of that whole thing is just about generations: I'm from the very tail end of the last generation to exist before the internet was pervasive. I keep typing out examples of how it used to be (I used to have to listen to the radio for new music! Or watch MTV!), but that's so boring and so friggin old lady. I'm just trying to paint a context for why I'm starting a new goddam blog, but my life is so complicated and fascinating and narrativized that it's hard.

It's just this: I'm internetty enough to be on myspace, but old-timey enough to feel self-conscious about it. I'm book enough that I have to rationalize it: well, on myspace, I'm a band, so I'm kinda forwarding my music by having a million friends there. Like how I was saying I justify livejournaling by calling it activism? Whatever. I think the whole point I'm getting to is just this: starting a blogger blog, the project here is just to have something on the internet that's not absolutely humiliating, or pointlessly (unless "hilarious" is a point, which it is- same for "obnoxious") vulgar, or whatever. A grownup thing! It's funny, I had a conversation with somebody today about getting a dog together, planning the logistics of it and stuff. Super lezzie, 'cause it's way in the future, but I think I might be turning into a grownup and losing interest in being a messy fuckup, too.

Nah, that's not true. I did make it to the second-to-last paragraph without really cussing, though.