Five Posts From My Livejournal Explained

05 Nov 2004|06:19am]

[music | fling.]

last night was a lot of up and down

and i guess thats what i’m best at.

i wanna be happy and most of the time since

tuesday i have been.

but other times…not so much.

i cant help but feel like a really big loser when it comes

to these kinds of things.

i get so scared..well i GOT really scared in this situation.

why can’t i just hold on and make things rgiht the first time

The main function of LJ was to vent. More often that not, I think, I used it as a daily record of life–like a normal journal–except a normal journal doesn’t talk back to you. This is how most people used LJ. I imagined LJ as a huge room of adolescents standing or sitting far away from each other who desperately wanted to have someone to talk to but were too socially awkward and instead of saying hello, they passed notes and stories to each other. It was easy to be this emotional and tragic when it was just a screen, and the promise of faceless comments was a palpable incentive. I was compelled to be this confessional because of venue and community. I saw that everyone else on LJ was this confessional, therefore I had to gush to fit in. It pushed me to be more open. When I started high school, I wanted to meet other kids who listened to Bright Eyes and were obsessed with The Perks of Being a Wallflower. They also had LJ accounts. LJ helped me meet these people at my high school in real life through comments. We would comment back and forth and eventually one of us would say “I’m going to say hi to you at school tomorrow.” It made me less shy, and gave me a small confidence boost because people would actually comment back. I felt less alone and isolated. I’m still painfully shy when I meet new people, but I think without LJ I would be the guy who inadvertently gives the cold shoulder at parties.

This post received four comments.

***

[24 Dec 2005|08:21pm]

[music|the valley arena.]

9) Do you have a new years resolution for 2006?

probably not.

10) Did you fall in love in 2005?

nahh.

11) If yes, with who?

.

12) If yes, do they know?

..

13) Are you still in love with them?

…

14) You regret it?

stop

I filled out these surveys a lot when I was 16. I used these to fish for comments. The survey posts were about questions. I wanted people to comment with “what’s wrong?” and/or “aww bb, IM me if you want to talk about it.”  Apparently, I’d just broken up with my first serious/semi-serious girlfriend. Notice how I left questions 11-13 blank except for a gradually increasing sense of discomfort and annoyance indicated by periods. I don’t remember who I supposedly didn’t (but did?) fall in love with, which is the worst part. That my dormant LJ is now a quasi-memorial for my recently departed teenage years but is too vague, too angsty, and too emo to me that I don’t remember what the post reflects makes me more embarrassed than my ranty posts. I almost never posted something that I meditated on for more than a day. My more private moments are not recorded on my LJ, not even in private entries. At least with my ranty posts I was being more real. Those posts never received comments.

This post received no comments.

***

[12 Feb 2007|01:24pm]

[music|battles – tras]

 

anticipated albums for 2007:

1. radiohead

2. wilco

3. the stooges

4. queens of the stone age

5. battles

6. dinosaur jr.

7. shellac.

Another main function of LJ was to showcase yourself. I desperately wanted to be the cool guy in high school. I needed to be the guy with the right clothes, hair, and taste. What these posts really fostered was shit-talking from your real life friends when you weren’t around. Notice that the albums listed are of at least four different genres. Also note that the bands are frequent Pitchfork front-pagers. LJ fosters instant memorialization and hyper narcissism. I was projecting what I desperately wanted to be. By posting on LJ the ideal version of myself became something I could wear. Some may remember LJ communities specifically for this purpose, eg. “mad_rad_hair,” of which I was a frequent contributor. Others catered specifically to outfits and mixtape tracklists. Many of these you had to be invited to or “apply” to by posting a picture of yourself along with answering a short questionnaire to prove you had enough scene points. I feel sick and embarrassed.

 

This post received one comment.

***

[17 May 2005|09:19pm]

[music|wilco.]

…

black shoes on a nightstand with a camisole

what are we doing here with our lives?

boys will write things down they dont really mean,

to make her cry, and if she cries then she submits

…

Typically, 1 out of 5 of your LJ friends were songwriters and/or poets, which meant that one to three times a week, you would see someone’s lyrics, poem, and/or overly sentimental, twee-ed out vignette on your feed. Everything felt so serious and dire and final at the time. Because these episodes were our first break-ups, fights with friends, et al., and we intrinsically knew we would not die from them (despite our poems) and there would be more to come, they were that much more serious. We almost bathed in the feeling.

This came from a song I wrote. It’s too much to post here because it goes on and on like this without getting anywhere, and there’s about 8 stanzas like this. I was trying really hard to sound poetic and poignant and significant. My favorite line here is the second one. What was I doing when I wrote that? Probably feeling sorry for myself, listening to Bright Eyes, consciously thinking “I’m feeling emo.”

This post received two comments.

***

[04 Aug 2007|09:22am]

bye.

This was my last LJ update. I was on a road trip moving to NYC. I think I was in Tennessee when I wrote this. I wanted to elicit bittersweetness from this post. I thought I was going to stay in New York forever when I left that first time. I wanted everyone to know that this was huge. That it was final. The post before this one is a really sappy open letter to my high school friends that essentially says “nice knowing you, but fuck you.” I expected people to comment with their own good-byes.

This post is the most telling and honest. My relationship there did not last and I moved back to CA, deleted my Facebook and Myspace, and didn’t have many friends because I alienated most of them. I felt more alone than I was at 16. The post acts as a pivot for me. Now I don’t rant and gush unedited into the Internet anymore. It goes into my writing. I don’t expect people to pity or sympathize or empathize with my work just because it’s on the Internet. I have a mostly productive and healthy and different relationship with the Internet now.

This post received no comments.

You should follow Thought Catalog on Twitter here.