Jaded Jennifer: Blogging

I got my first diary for Christmas when I was 8 years old. It was green, which is my favorite color. (Don't be fooled by all of the pink on this page. I really do like green the best. Pink comes in a close second now.) I remember the false sense of security that flimsy lock provided me. Like my older sister wouldn't be able to crack through this high-tech system to read all of the secrets I was so sure I would be writing inside.

As any child does, I wrote it in it for a whole 2 days before I ran out of things to say. Despite my lack of juicy secrets, I found myself collecting diaries. By the time I was 13 years old, and my secrets would begin, I had 4 of them. My green one, with most of the pages still bare, a satiny red one, a velvet green one that had a simple snap instead of a lock, and my favorite one. My favorite one was given to me by my best friend who moved clear across the state. It was bigger than the others and had a unicorn and rainbow on it.

I switched back and forth, writing in different diaries until my friend gave me that unicorn one, and from that day forward I wrote in it exclusively. When I discovered my sister reading them out loud to her friends one day, I decided I needed better security in the form of a cosmetic suitcase with real locks and a key. I stored all of my diaries in there, where they still reside today.

I started my first online journal back in 2002. It was a rough time for me, with the demise of a 13 year relationship, and I felt the need to write about the things I was going through. Little did I realize how popular online journaling (or blogging, as it's now referred to) would become. I had approximately 13 friends who would read my journal daily to keep up on the things going on with me. Once I had an audience, my writing changed a lot. I began catering to them, writing about the funny events more often than the sad ones, and paying close attention to the wording of every single sentence.

I think I currently have blogs on 4 or 5 different sites. Livejournal (my first journaling site, where I currently have 2 different blogs), Blogspot (of course), Wordpress (which still only has 1 post) and my MySpace blog, where I write the most. I may have one somewhere else, but if it still exists, I'm certainly not using it anymore. I find that my MySpace blog is the only one that contains accounts of events going on in my life, perhaps because I have a lot of family who reads it. Rarely do I vent about things on there and when I do, I try to keep it as vague as possible to avoid hurting anybody's feelings. The freedom to say what I want and be who I am is lost for me in this world of online blogging, which is probably why I seek out sites where I can be anonymous. It's a different feeling knowing that the people who may read it won't really know me, and will judge me based on the words they read.

On here, I can be anyone I want to be. I can be that exotic woman you pass on the street, who walks with her nose in the air and would walk right over you to get to her destination. I can be the eccentric stranger who walks up to your table in a restaurant and grabs some fries off of your plate, dipping them in your ketchup with a smile, knowing you won't say a word because you're not quite sure if she's insane or not. Or I could be the kind, sympathetic neighbor who always lends a hand, doing things like shoveling the snow off your walk, or feeding your cat while you're on vacation. Hell, I could even be the grouchy lady on the bus who does nothing but bitch about things like taxes, traffic, and grouchy ladies on buses.

I think I'll choose to be all of them. But today, I'm the 33 year old woman, with the voice of a 12 year old, who just made her first video blog. I wonder if this is the way things have evolved. Starting with my little green diary, I have now become the video blogger, too lazy to even type the words out, instead choosing to click on a button and talk.

Nah. I still like writing way too much to stop doing it. But recording videos is fun too. So, here's my first video blog. Turn up your volume, press play, and don't make fun of my 12 year old voice dammit!