The Jamjar

I wrote and saved this

I wrote and saved this file as 36.html yesterday and yet it is gone. Go.. Geocities. I am not here much longer.

So it's boxing day and this year is banging ahead splendidly. It's quiet and I am alone and will be until Freya gets here. I phoned my family yesterday. Even spoke to my mother, so see, I can be a good girl sometimes. My brother is going to stick around until New Year so we can visit and Christopher is there too and thats just very cool bananas. Kristy and Emma'll be around so its just gonna be a really nice couple of days. I wonder what Freya'll make of my family. I wonder if they will be normal for her.. i bet they will be cos they suck at being abnormally polite for any length of time.

I feel the need to bang on about content again.. so I think I will go and shower instead.

..later..

I am clean, but it seems to have taken hours. I watched lame tv and plucked my eyebrows after finally locating my ever invisible tweezers. I have a message on my phone to return video rentals. Yah.. well.. I am always late.

Online Diaries. I guess this is one on account there is a date at the top of each page. Diary suggests something secret and undermatressy. We who document our thoughts and daily events in this format online want our diaries to be read. So they are personal but not private. But all of a sudden, there seems to be a 'diary boom'.

Last year, was it? yes.. last year Freya and I had a giggle over a few months putting up a page together, which still holds some good stuff. Part of that site was a diary. Each wrote seperately, sitting next to each other. Before that I had scooted around the web looking at a few of the 'diary' rings that had clustered together. Mostly they were pretty boring. Words and words and words about what they had had for breakfast and who was going out with who (whom) etc etc.

With the advent of diaryland.com the interest in keeping a diary has seemed to have exploded to the point nearly everyone I know online has one. Some are good, some are personal, some are actually private. I wonder if it's a fad though. The hysteria of gathering net-real-estate. I have noticed on my little circuit of diaryland stops that some are being updated less often, some have stopped being updated at all. And no, I don't think it's just the time of the year.

What are the good things about keeping your diary online? For a start it means you are updating your webspace regularly. Adding fresh content which is essential to the evolution of the web. It's great to have an audience. People who are attracted back again and again to see what you are up to, rewarded in doing so by new, fresh content. Because let's face it, its all about connections, isn't it? Writing things down is good for the soul too. Getting ideas on paper, so to speak, to sort thoughts out, and to revisit over time.

As a person who is accused of spending far too much 'time on line' I have to say, internet addicts often have the most boring of diaries. Just like a website, it's author has to be receiving fresh updates and new content and stimulis constantly. We need to be getting up out of the chair and hurtling around the world bringing the interesting stuff back, filtering it to give it our own flavour then publishing it with pixels. Those on my diary circuit do that. Their content is freshened and perspectivised often, even if they too are accused of sitting around in front of that damned computer too often. heh, we are borderline.. but we pass.

okay I lost my thread then.

I want to add to my Parklife section with an hilarious story about my sister and the art of living in the moment. But I can't capture the images of the event in my head. It is by far the funniest thing I have ever heard out of her mouth. Maybe I should record her and put it up as a .ra or something. I doubt she would let me do that though, maybe i could bug her phone or something *thinks*.

She was telling me all the ways I have ruined her life. I had no idea. She has at least five seperate "how shelley ruined my birthday" stories. I was amazed. (i am not going to beable to remember all five, and she's gone to the beach so I can't phone her and have her confirm, but I will give it a bash..)

...apparently at one of her birthday parties, I organised the games. I can vaguely remember spending a lot of time getting a treasure hunt arranged and supervising it and being chuffed that it was successful. Her version of events are the same as mine, except from her perspective I stole all her friends and she ran away from her birthday party. I didn't remember that part. She said no one had noticed.
...I had no idea, but according to Jo, every year each of us in turn received a 'big' present for christmas. Jo said it was her turn for a big present as I had got one the year before and Wayne the year before that. I am gonna have to get back to you on this one.. i can't remember the specific details.. I'll find out in the New Year and update this
... we were given a doll each for Christmas. Now the facts are fuzzy, I always believed I was given the brown haired doll and Jo the blonde. The neighbours stole the blonde haired doll on Boxing Day and shaved its head and poked it's eyes out and I found it in a box down in the creek about a week later. My dad punched their dad in the mouth. However, Joanne doesn't recall all the details as I do. Yes, she said, we each received a doll for Christmas, but she got the brown haired doll and me the blonde, which she said, was typical cos the blonde one was nicer. She maintains the neighbours did in fact take the blonde doll but I then took her doll cos I no longer had a doll. That actually doesn't sound like me, but then, truth never did have a lot to do with history. I can remember finding the hair in the neighbours play house, then finding the doll after searching and searching for it, cos i was so mad at them making my little sister so miserable. But Jo is adament, and her memory has always been superior to mine.
... and then their was the whole 'gifts from australia' thing. I think Jo got a few holidays merged into one. But I will tell it from her viewpoint. What she saw was my Uncle Peter and Aunty Jackie returning from a trip to Australia bearing gifts. She said she saw item after item being lifted from the boot of their car, all for me.. a tape recorder, a guitar, clothes, felt tipped pens, package after package. And all she got was a koala purse and a pen. I remember that, not the hauling of massive quantities of gifts for me, but being given the radio/tape recorder I had been aching for. I got the guitar that same Christmas. They were gifts from my father, who had asked Peter to buy them for me in Australia. I received the tape recorder before his death. The guitar after. So I am thinking this episode was around June/July of 1975.
Poor Jo. She really did seem to get left behind in the scramble of being the third child. I had no idea, I am hopelessly blind at the best of times but as a teen I was worse. She shared all this with me on the phone, and yeh, obviously she is 'over' the feelings that used to boil inside her over them but the memories are still there. We laughed and laughed but there was an unpinning serious miscarriage of attention evident, that I am not saying is my fault exactly, but the adults in our lives sure could do with a good kick up the arse for letting her feel that way for so long. I of course was gloriously happily spoilt, and that's the main thing. Kinda puts her young teens in perspective for me now, though.
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