Mark Twain

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.


Dorothy Parker

Ducking for apples - change one letter and it's the story of my life.


Bertrand Russell

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

300th Entry! I Want Cake!


2004-06-30 at 5:46 p.m.

300th entry! Wooo!

I started this journal in 2001, February to be exact. I wrote for a while, got distracted because I have no attention span, forgot I had an online journal for about a year and then BOOM! I remembered and started writing again. A lot.

I've met some very cool and very interesting people online, I'm happy to say and I love checking in on them and their lives whenever I can. I find them poignant and entertaining, an intriguing look into the lives of people I've never met, but I wish I could. As for me, I hope I entertain you guys, since that's what I try to do here at Chez Gem-chan.

This journal serves a lot of functions for me. It lets me blow off steam, it lets me express myself like I may never be able to in real life, it lets me think. I do hope someday to actually write a book (doesn't every one say that?!) and so I also use this journal to practice my mad story telling skills.

No, I don't make anything up. It takes real creativity, I think, to take the true events of life, the seemingly mundane little things that happen every day and turn them into something worth reading. Isn't that what story tellers do?

I want to write a book about my great-grandparents on my father's side. They lived interesting lives, especially great-grandpa, who was in his life time a watchmaker, a breeder of champion terriers, a long-distance runner for Scotland, a womanizer, a poet, a writer, a political activist and a drunk.

He was such a womanizer and a drunk that my great-grandmother divorced him around 1918. Given that divorce was still frowned upon as late as the 1960s and 70s, the fact that she divorced him at a time when it was socially unacceptable to do so speaks volumes. He died four years later at the age of 44 when his liver gave out.

His poetry and writings are fascinating glimpses into his psyche and I truly believe that he suffered from a mental illness, like I, my father, brother and uncle do, and like my grandfather did.

There is so much self-destruction in my family and I think it goes back to him, probably farther. Someday I want to write a book about him.

Huh. I went off on a tangent there.

Anyway, this is my 300th entry and I have to admit I'm surprised that I've kept with it, given that I usually start something and never finish it. I have dozens of actual, physical journals with two or three entries in them, lying abandoned under my bed or in a box somewhere. It must be that, unlike a real journal, people read this and I get feedback.

It's sort of like talking to my best friend, and I never get tired of that.

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