On Monday I will turn 27 and Emily Magazine will turn 3. I just went back and read the archive of the first month and wow, what a mindfuck. Anyone who’s had a blog for a while — and I realize that three years isn’t really so long, in the grand Sichean scheme of things — probably feels me on this: it’s amazing to see this little stop-motion portrait of your former brain. My obsessions and observations and jokes seem so alien and so familiar at the same time. Some things will never change: a dude recently told me that he felt like reading my blog gave him an “unfair advantage” because, he said, by reading it he could always tell exactly what was going on in my head at any given time. And I was like ‘Oh wow you somehow managed to penetrate all the subtext? (eyeroll).’

My point in reporting this conversation besides sending a little backchannel shoutout to that guy — which, it is totally my Jewish New Year’s resolution to quit doing that! (but before I quit entirely I should mention that anyone who hasn’t yet bought me a birthday present should know that <hint>my hands get cold sometimes when I’m riding my bike </hint>) — is just to say that yeah: here it is, what’s going on in my head, and here it has been for kind of a while now. Okay! Here it is! And I like having it here, but sometimes — like when my dad writes me an email about how he’s glad he was supportive of my having a dream kitten baby, or when uh hundreds of people show up and want to tell me how to live — it can be weird.

(Speaking of the dream kitten baby: dream omelet! )(via Alice IRL)

When I was a kid I kept a painstakingly detailed diary (you’re shocked, right?) and then at some point in high school I did this horribly obnoxious thing where I went back and annotated the previous entries, using all the hindsight and wisdom my 16 year old self had garnered. Yuck; I’m trying not to do that now.

But! Rereading, I noticed my writing moving in and out of this specific kind of crippling cutesy self-consciousness that sometimes seems inverse to the amount of actual attention the writing was getting. Take my first entry, for example — so apologetic:

“Welcome to my totally private diary on the internerd. Emily Magazine is here to fill a gaping niche: the world wide information superhighway does not have enough first person blah blah blah. And even if it was already glutted, my thoughts would be different and special because they’re mine.”

I hate being like that. I’m still like that sometimes. We should all try to stop being like that and just go ahead and believe that our thoughts are different and special because they’re ours.

There’s something about the tonelessness or the contextlessness of the Internet that makes Internet writing tend towards extremes of either facetiousness or sincerity. When I reread those early entries and, actually, a lot of what I’ve written online, I see myself wobbling, trying to somehow pull off a balance between those extremes by using doses of sincerity to counteract facetiousness and vice versa. Good thing I will now learn from my mistakes and never do that anymore because, like my 16 year old diary-annotating self, I have now officially figured everything out.

Wait. Fuck!