Telephone line through time

[icepixie]

Non-poll, free-for-all question: Why do you read my journal? Has the reason(s) changed since you first friended me? (It's nearly ScaperCon weekend; I'm feeling a desire to connect to people.)

*

I'm really liking the song in my music field at the moment. The music is not exactly peppy, but the lyrics are really good for...hmmm...not cheering up, exactly, but for feeling better about certain things. Plus, it's about literary research--presumably--and that certainly gets my attention. (I would make a great college professor if the job just didn't include teaching as well as research and writing.)

I particularly like this section:

they published your diary
and that's how i got to know you
the key to the room of your own and a mind without end
and here's a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
and the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
so i know i'm all right
life will come and life will go
still i feel it's all right
cause i just got a letter to my soul
and when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughs in my face
you say each life has its place

And then it gets seriously a bit weird towards the end, but hell, it's about Virginia Woolf, so what else do you expect? And this is just...yeah, it's all there in the text; I don't need to explicate. But it was what I needed to hear this week.

(Plus, I'm also reading Beatrix Potter's journal at the moment, and dipping into Swift's Journal to Stella here and there; few journals and collections of letters have such personality, in my experience, particularly Potter's.)

This doesn't have anything to do with the fact that I'm halfway through Orlando, although I will say that I'm surprised at how readable and good it is. I hated The Waves but kind of liked Mrs. Dalloway, so I thought I'd give her one more chance before I wrote her off completely. And although it's starting to get a bit strange, I fell in love with the first half, and I'm willing to read the next 150 pages even if they go way off the deep end. I don't say that about many things I don't have to read for class.

OMG, I may end up liking that woman yet! (But I still reserve the right to laugh at the "never give a typewriter to the Virginian Woolfsnake" line in one of the Lemony Snickett books.)

Comments

[alto2.livejournal.com]

Hee. The watch saga really took on a life of its own there for a while, didn't it? I have to admit, I'm really kind of disappointed that there's nothing to solve or wonder about at the moment. It was fun :)

The question is certainly a legitimate one to ask. :) I'm glad you're not planning to change your content, etc, because it seems to me that it would be more about who's reading and less about you, and if your own journal is not about you, well... that'd be a shame.

[icepixie]

That watch would make a great start for a mystery story or something like that.

Yeah, changing my content based on what readers want to read rather than what I want to write about would be very silly. :) I was just thinking about the mixture of people I have on my flist, and wondering if there was much crossover between the RL folks (mostly college friends) and the fandom folks, or if people were here for very specific things, or whatever. From the comments so far, it seems like there's more crossover than I thought, which is awesome. (Although it shouldn't be surprising, as I do the same thing...I usually friend someone because of a fandom connection, and then get interested in their life, if they write much about RL, so even if the fandom connection goes away, I've still got a friend.)

[alto2.livejournal.com]

You're not the first person who's mentioned the watch and/or the investigation thereof turning up in a story at some point, so you never know, it might just happen!

It's funny you mention the fandom connection leading to friendship. Another friend of mine was asking a week or so ago how people chose to friend someone. I was stunned when one person replied that she had no interest in anyone who wasn't pretty much all-fandom-all-the-time. I can't imagine finding too many people like that who are interesting for very long--I'd think they'd be repeating themselves all the time. But I suppose this is why she and I aren't on each other's lists, at least in part. Lord knows, I babble about my life far more than I journal about fandom (I should actually warn you about my tendency to gripe about my school, since I'm not griping about it at the moment!). I'd rather read about actual people and their thoughts on the things they see/read/etc, but everyone's different that way, I guess. ::shrug::

[icepixie]

I don't think I have anyone on my flist who's all-fandom-all-the-time. I wouldn't be averse to friending someone who was, but once they or I moved on to fandoms the other wasn't in, there'd be little incentive to keep that person on my flist. (And as I am an utter fannish magpie, that would probably happen sooner rather than later!)

About half of the people on my flist actually are folks I met through the Farscape-Shippers list on...well, it was Onelist when it was started, so that gives you an idea of how long ago that was. Again, fandom connection at first, and then we all got to know and love each other on the list, went to ScaperCons together, generally became friends...and now I read their journals mostly to keep up with their lives, and anytime we have a fandom connection (we tended to move amongst fandoms in a pack back in the day, and sometimes still do now), that's just gravy.

I like a good fandom post as much as anyone, but yeah, it's mostly about the people behind that post.

(I should actually warn you about my tendency to gripe about my school, since I'm not griping about it at the moment!)

Hehehe. No worries. I was tagging my entries for the past two years or so, and it's really amazing how often the tags "grrr, argh" and "academia" showed up together, so I know exactly what you mean. ;)