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Conundrum of Conformity

12th June, 2004. 7:21 pm. This is my journal, there are many like it but this one is mine...

Hello and welcome to the very first entry.

I've never done anything like this before, though I do have to admit to attempting to keep hand-written journals before. I'm not exactly sure where I should start or what I should say at this point. I do think that this endeavor will be a lot more fruitful since I will have the luxury of adding to my journal more easily, then carrying around a notepad, or notebook or some other bound paper form of media. Can we say thank you internet for invading our lives nearly completely?

I'm also more optimistic that I will be able to keep up with this journal, since I can type a lot faster than I can write. Without sounding arrogant, my brain works at unusual speeds and thoughts flow through and out of me at incredible rates. So much so, that in a normal conversation if I am not careful my comments and words can emcompass several topics and end up being more of a distraction than an addition.

I would like to point out that though this is intended as a public journal, a serious look into the journey that is me this is in no way an attempt at vanity. I want to look at this as a better way of placing my thoughts, fears, doubts and successes into view, for perusal and understanding than a way of garnering thousands of hits per day. I've read journals like that. I've read postings on messageboards, and several different types of forums of interesting and articulate people. I have no hope that I will be numbered among them.

This is the journey that is me. There are no tickets to buy, no standard lay-overs, no daily requirement of attendance and you can get on and off this journey whenever the mood strikes you. I just thank you for your understanding, your patience in trying to understand me, and your criticisms on the stupidities I have created.

Welcome.

Current mood: pensive.
Current music: Prince.

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12th June, 2004. 9:26 pm. Nicknames

This is a new one for me. The current nickname that I am using for this journal is a swift departure from the norm. It doesn't give an automatic denotion of male or female but lies in ambiguity. My former nickname consisted of a bastardization of my IRL name. Well, the legal name that was given to me at my birth, but that nickname carried with it over 4yrs of baggage. I had adopted it during my roleplaying days on chatservers, not associated with either AOL, Yahoo, or MSN.

These chatservers were stand-alone places with specific html created rooms, based on themes ranging from overtly sexual to hang-outs. It was very similar to some of the channels I have seen on IRC subsequently. You could create images, hosted on other sites to display along with your name in various colors and font styles to create your own style. I was quite active in these rooms from July 1998 to June 2000, and not just on one particular server though my "main" server changed a few times. After June 2000, I was a more infrequent visitor due to a change in my real life situation. I'll go more into that in another entry.

Back to the subject at hand: Life happened and my former nick followed me everywhere, it was my identity. Email addresses, Ebay accounts, ICQ numbers, and all manner of the necessary log-ins were utilized with my identity. Even now, my more recent accounts included this identity. All that changed were the occasional passwords. It wasn't until just a couple months ago that it came into swift clarity that my identity held a lot more connotations than it needed to.

As I mentioned already, my ICQ number had been tied to my former nickname. I hadn't logged in for over a year, and I wasn't sure that anyone would remember me. During my heyday, we used to have duels with ICQ numbers. Mostly it was whoever had the biggest list, but sometimes the duel was who could log into the most numbers and message the other person first. Of course the duel was pointless if you didn't have all of the other person's numbers on all of yours, so a third person was usually the victim of this innocent form of cyber-stalking. After logging in, and recieving the commensurate flood of offline messages, I did recieve a number of active messages from people who were simply surprised to see that identity actively online.

I knew that during my roleplaying days that I had been an influence over quite a number of storylines, and my opinion had been sought out on more than a handful of occasions. It's my belief that should I have expressed any sort of acceptance on the subject matter, to the person inquiring that would have meant tacit approval and support for their cause, but I never truly appreciated the manner in which changes in my personal life were so swiftly spread about. Trust is a precarious device, and even those whom I believed could be trusted ended up breaking said trust. Not unusual by any means, except for the individual in question.

After allowing myself to be messaged openly by as many people as wanted to, it slowly began to dawn on me. This is not who I was anymore. No, not just the identity but the hours and hours spent chattering away in ICQ IM's to expand not only my personal knowledge but my own personal social skills.

I have recently started playing a newly released MMORPG. I did begin my indoctrination to this game with my former nick, but it was starting to get tedious. I was getting tired of lugging that name about. I created this current one, and I had originally planned to only use it in that game and keep using the other nick as my main identity. But as the saying goes: Its time to set aside childish things. I have nearly decided that this shall be my new permanent form of identity. The jury is still out...

Current mood: mellow.

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