effervescible | So Jaina is not dead

As you've seen from the various rinky-drink tests & quizzes posts. But gosh, I've gotten out of the habit of writing about me and my life daily. Blame it on band camp or on my lazy qualities, but here I am, and I'm making an effort to get back in the groove.

Something I've been wavering on for the past couple of months--and no, this isn't why you haven't been seeing me, I've just really been quiet--is whether to pull a Minki and friendslock my entire journal. It's tough. To do so would take away what I think is one of the coolest aspects of livejournal. I really like reading some journals, some being those of people I've never met. I've made some friends this way. I've also found just plain interesting reading. While friendslocking my journal wouldn't keep me from continuing to explore the unknown territory of lj, it would keep others from diong the same to me. I'll be honest, I really like the feeling I get when I see that someone new has added me to their friends list first. It's nice to be liked. Also, oddly, I don't mind complete strangers reading the bulk of my journal. Anything that I'm iffy about is already locked. But lately, I've been wondering how much "me" is coming through to my journal and how much is "me aware that I am being watched". There are also certain people I don't want reading this journal. (Char, does your family still have the link to yours or was that someone else? *grin*) Sometimes I friendslock anyways if I'm bitching about someone who doesn't even know about lj, just in case. So it's weird--I'd almost rather have a button to to press that decides who not to let read my journal. But unfortunately, there's no option for "only people who already know me well or complete strangers can see". Strangers don't really bother me most of the time because what the hell do I care what they think of me? I don't know them. And they can become friends. So every time I almost friendslock everything, I think about that and about the fact that my lovelies on diaryland wouldn't be able to read it and I would never tell them to get a lj account just for me. So here I am still. I hope this doesn't make anyone feel weird--not directed at anyone specific, truly. Just a growing feeling I've been having. The conclusion I keep reaching is to just leave things as they are and use the friends-only key more liberally, which I'll probably start doing if I keep up the regular schedule.

But who knows.

There's more to talk about, but right now I feel like pondering things.

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I think about that a lot, too...and I think about whether I just plain make too much stuff friends-only so that random users can only read the dumb crap. Mainly cause I like to bitch about other people in here, but I don't want it to seem like I'm gossiping...I use nicknames for a lot of people but I still usually lock it just because I would feel really bad if they somehow wandered upon this, even if I didn't say anything bad I think it might be creepy to find stuff about you posted to the world. And yeah, I don't care about strangers...but I do like being able to make friend groups so that only certain people can see certain things. I feel strange divulging certain things about myself to my friends I know IRL, where I can talk about them to xfr people, who I've known for so long and trust, or to strangers, who I don't care what the hell they think of me.

I'm rambling now. That was just my thoughts on the subject.

It's an interesting problem, yeah. To some degree, one has to think, "Well, I'm posting my journal on the internet, so why would I do that if I didn't want other people to read it?" But then one starts to consider the sort of very introspective, personal stuff that can come out in this sort of medium... and you don't want the people you KNOW to start reading it. ;)

Heh. I use LJ as a way to stay connected to the people I do know, and satisfy my curiosity about the people I don't. And there have sometimes been things that I've wanted to say that I kept myself from saying or altered slightly to benefit the people I know are reading my journal... but in a sense, that's because I would prefer those things be said in person. I'm the kind of person who takes a problem to a person to discuss it firsthand, so if I need to say something to a friend and they're reading LJ, I'm going to wind up saying something about it anyway. This way, there's a little fore-warning. ;)

And I enjoy reading your journal, for the record, Jaina. I don't have you on my friends list because I've never felt right about just randomly adding people without their knowing that I'm doing it... so I just read you through

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It's linked off of my homepage, so by now all of my family members and quite a few of the family friends have it. Why do you think I friendslocked the Scrabble one? ~.^

I personally enjoy having it open. It provides a way for my family and distant friends to keep up with me without having to write multiple email letters, and it's really not that big of an incovinence to lock the posts I don't want viewed by everyone and their dog. <shrug> I've even got a couple of friends filters set up so I can distinguish between posts I don't mind all of my friends seeing and those that I might want to block from some people. I haven't had to use them yet, but they're there just in case.

So Jaina is not dead

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