Feeling: Honest
Listening to: Coldplay, "We Never Change"
Reading/Watching: Mom. We went shopping for her today. She still managed to coax me into new clothes.

You know, I could tell y'all pretty much anything I wanted.

And most of you would have to buy it. Most of you wouldn't know any better. Only a few would read it and immediately say, "That's total BS." The rest would sit back and mutter, "I... hope she's just kidding."

That's what it all boils down to. I could lie my tail off in here, and you would not know. What's stopping me? Nothing. I see other (pathetic) d-landers do it all the time. They think their life is so boring, they have to spice it up to get readers.

Why?! It's your life, you freaks. Whether other people find it worth reading about every week (or day or hour) is meaningless. Because it's yours. The original meaning of a diary was to express your feelings and catalogue memories for yourself, not show off HTML knowledge and attempt to entertain dozens of faceless strangers who would enjoy reading your life like a sitcom script.

People get way too competitive these days. I'll even catch myself doing it, checking my stats and being disappointed if I get less than 20 hits a day. I'll wonder what I'd have to do to get more people to visit and keep coming back.

I could start writing myself into this as if it were a book. I could turn this into a new version of Don't Call Me Irwin, making myself Melissa, the quirky underappreciated heroine, scripting myself into adventures and boyfriends and dramas and whatever type of life I've always thought I wanted. People loved it with DCMI. All the little teenage girls on the writing boards begged for new chapters every day, and I felt so cool, because it was based on my life, not actually a true account of it. Anecdotes were compressed from the past 3 years and made into a cute little novel, spiced with fabrications, like "Aaron" and "Tuyen" and the whole first-kiss scenario that never happened.

But Melissa was the me I wanted to be. In the end, I'd go back and read it and just feel like more of a loser for needing to invent myself a more satisfactory existence.

The thing is, I know I read this thing much more often than any of you do. Because I write it for me. It helps me, to return to situations I know I've been through before, feelings I've already dealt with, occasionally cheer myself up with past optimistic passages. If all of you stopped reading it tomorrow, I'd still use it. It would take me longer to tell all my long-distance friends individually about what's going on in my life, since this has been our group mode of communication since highschool, but the journal would keep on growing.

I appreciate that you want to read it. It's nice to know my friends and cousins and even people I've never met before are interested in seeing what I have to say. But I don't need you to. And I refuse to fabricate just to keep you here.

For the record, everything in this journal from beginning to present (except the poetry and such) has been absolute truth.

And I'm going to keep it that way.

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