Years
After posting the below congratulations to Rob, I got to thinking about how long I’ve been reading journals. I started reading various journals when I was just posting weekly notes to my Geocities website about what I had been doing.
Which means, I’ve been following some journalers as long as I’ve been married. Or longer, for that matter. After 8 years of following people, you get to know a lot about their lives, and you think about them when they don’t post, or when they post something worrying. It’s normal from what other journal readers have told me.
I got to meet some journalers at JournalCon DC. In fact, it was the first time I got to meet any journalers. The first person who talked to me was Pineapple Girl. In fact, she realized that I couldn’t push my wheelchair at that point (hours of travel in the heat, and in lots of pain and I just was wore out.) She wheeled me to the registration area, which in that hotel was a pain, as the floors had some odd things going on causing the wheels on my chair to want to go this way and that way.
She introduced me to several other journalers, including Rob (who looked shellshocked and spoke very quietly, I later learned Rob is very shy at first.)
I had a good time that weekend, connecting with people from TUS, 3WA, and various journalers from all over the internet. I didn’t spend as much time mingling, as others did, as it is just harder for me to do, with my gimpiness.
The best time that weekend, though, was being on a panel with TranceJen and Weetabix with Mo moderating it. Those women are funny and wonderful, and just amazing. I laughed so hard during our panel that I thought my face was going to crack open.
What really saddens me is that JournalCon seems to have died, there isn’t one this year, not even a mention of it. I had hoped to make it to another one, as the (and I hate this term) old school journalers, are really a great group of people overall.
I know that everyone in the world has a blog now but so many of them aren’t personal at all and you just don’t get the feel for people the way you used to.
There are still a lot of us long timers on TUS and 3WA but, the community really has changed. A lot of people have private journals, that you have to be friended or passworded to read, many have quit entirely. It’s odd and sad to see a large part of what made me like the internet drifting away.