In contrast to last night’s marathon theological websurfing, this evening I took a two-and-a-half hour nap in the recliner. So, not much to report there.
Oh, I was looking through one of my handwritten journals from 1997 last night, and found a printout from the old scale at the Woodland Small in BG. In November of 1997, I weighed 197 pounds. The scale said I was 35 pounds overweight, which I still think is a crock, considering my height and build. But, yeah, in another five pounds or so, I’ll be at my seven-years-ago weight. (Good lord; I gained fifty pounds in seven years! That’s disgusting.)
It’s interesting reading my old journals. The really interesting ones are still at home in Parma (I hope), from high school and middle school and even elementary school. Chronicles of my tonsillectomy, the Challenger disaster, my crush on my 40-something middle school choir director, my annual February depression, joining high school band, getting college rejection letters, and everything in between. I was a seriously depressed kid; in today’s terms, I might have even been put on medication (if my Mom had realized how depressed I was, that is. Either I hid it from her well, or she was completely in denial).
Is there a way to archive this LiveJournal stuff off of their server? Not that I want to jinx LJ, but I’ve never been comfortable having something important on a remote server without a backup. If I’m going to put my journaling online instead of in an actual journal (which I’ve found is much more fun, and just as cathartic, if a bit more topically restrictive), I want to have the option of backing it up without printing the whole damn thing out or just saving the HTML.
My stepdad, Tom, used to tell Mom that his journal was always open to her to read. She didn’t feel the same about hers, and I think he respected her privacy in that. She just couldn’t grasp the concept of having a non-private journal—to her (and to me, until recently), a journal was a place where you wrote things you couldn’t tell anyone. Both of us were at our most prolific journaling when we were miserable, which is kind of unfortunate in retrospect. Makes it seem like our lives were simply unbearable, when in fact it was only certain stretches that were bad. The happy moments didn’t always get chronicled, and the “normal” moment virtually never did.
That’s one reason why I’ve been trying to write in my LJ fairly often, even if it’s about nothing interesting: just to remind myself later what it was like to be “normal” in my late 20’s. Once we have kids, Aaron and I, our lives are going to change forever—or for a sufficiently long time, anyway—and it’ll be interesting to go back and remember what it was like to have lazy evenings sleeping in the recliner. 🙂
edit: Oh, I figured out how to export my LJ as XML. I had to do it by month, but that’s just as well, since that’s how I would have wanted to do it, anyway. So, I now have backups of my entries, even though they don’t seem to have paragraph or line breaks. D’oh!
