by Hannah Lauder

Created on: June 04, 2009

I first joined Livejournal in 2004 for the sheer novelty of being able to take part in something popular that actually involved an interest of mine: abusing a computer's keyboard. My mother's computer already had a store of half-written poetry and desperate imitations of Katherine Mansfield stories. Combine that with my interest in journaling and a secretive nature that longed to prostitute itself, I quite happily joined up. I selected an appropriately vague username, an appropriately puzzling user icon which would give the potential reader just enough insight into my personality and off I went with my first, vague journal entry:

2 May 2004
Time: 11:19 AM
(No mood or music given, my apologies)

Sundays are horrible days, ruining my small weekly slice of an idyllic life, which involves no people to push around, trip
over, worrying about having to trip over, and so on. Now I have to prepare to trip over them once again.

You know, I really wish I was drunk on power...

Then began the inevitable friends collection, the joining of communities. I switched to a paid account in order to get rid of the abominable banner ad gracing the top of my masterwork (this has since been done away with on free accounts). This also gave you more user photos. Members of Livejournal tend to cultivate a bit of a fetish for these. In fact, there are whole Livejournal communities devoted to their creation. I admit I tinkered a bit with a free trial version of PhotoShop in order to fashion some that would truly suit.

I always got a kick whenever some stranger chanced upon my Livejournal and commented or friended me. It made me feel a little famous, not to mention the self-validation and ego-boost. It was my chance to be bombastic and ridiculous on a site that very well demanded it. Livejournal never quite manages to promote itself as a blogging site for serious writers, much to its credit.

You can trash a Livejournal. Wordpress or Blogspot are equivalent to that $40 leatherbound journal you splurged upon. Livejournal is the $2 composition book to be positively wrecked. You can be unabashedly hormonal, use terrible grammar, indulge in repetition for that horridly repetitious life that eats at you and will kill you off at such a tender age. You can be a good writer and be lauded. And even if you're a bad writer, there is someone out there who will want read it (high school classmates and your garden variety stalker). It simply doesn't stop to ponder itself too much, nor does

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