28.09.98 - Building Rome in a day

It's tempting to get deeply philosophical in an online journal and start rambling poetic words that you think people will be impressed by. That was never my intention with this. In fact I have always aimed for quite the opposite, to create an entry that flows as a stream of words might from my mouth like the narrative from a novel. I'm not saying that this reads like a novel... although just lately it feels like a horror story.

Life has its ups and downs, we all know that. I've been on (to use an already overused analogy) a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs over the past few weeks and I sometimes wonder how I get through it, not being a really strong person. Perhaps I am stronger than I give myself credit for, and is it all important to be that strong anyway? Well I'm really not sure of much anymore. I haven't become flippant about life but I am trying to teach myself to be less intense about things, especially negative things. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

I took a hard knock on Sunday and it was such a stupid thing to happen. I got myself into the situation so I shouldn't have been so shocked, but I was. I can be so naive sometimes but in learning things we all have to be a little naive at the start. That is the lesson I am teaching myself anyway so I hope its right. I have a history for making wrong decisions and I look back on things and worry about the way I handle them. I realised today from talking to someone online with their own set of problems that there are some very important things that I was overlooking. I suppose the main thing I overlooked was that I value my friends dearly and in the pursuit of something more than friendship I have almost lost these people so dear to me. I neglected some, I pushed some away because they didn't fit in my scheme of things and others I just messed up by doing something dumb on the spur of the moment. I've taken the time to re-evaluate these friendships and realise that I want to keep them more than anything. I want new friends too and by God I am trying my hardest to sort this out tonight!

'Rome wasn't built in a day', so they say, but that doesn't mean I can't make a big difference to my life in a very short time. Already tonight I have made one phone call to revive an old friendship I had neglected and made another phone call to start tracks in making a new friendship. I intend to write e-mail or speak online to someone else tonight to make sure I haven't messed up a new friendship already (if there is one there anyway... but I will find that out). I will spend this upcoming weekend apologising and trying to recover from a bit of a crappy situation with a very close friend and to my delight I have rediscovered a friendship with someone online. Overall I feel quite positive but it took something really crap to make me realise I needed a change of attitude. I'd like to just thank Mark from Canada here for incidentally making me realise these things as a result of our conversation earlier today. Life is too short for losing friends and making a mess out of silly situations. I don't want to keep repeating my mistakes and I am trying to learn from them and recover slowly.

Online journals are such a strange phenomenon. From time to time I examine why I keep this up and what I get out of it and there are as many answers as there are questions. When I write here I write for myself as much as other people and I actually enjoy discovering my thoughts, feelings and actions in written word. I have been known to go back and read an old entry and it fascinates me to see how I have progressed or changed since that entry. I participated in a sort of interview from a journalist with ".net" magazine about the subject of online journals. If you want to see how this article shapes up then check out the magazine that goes on sale October 15th apparently. It should appear online somewhere (or so he says) soon after at http://www.netmag.co.uk but I am sure I will let you know about the article when its published anyway :) It will be interesting to see what he has to say and he tells me that my site URL will be featured somewhere in the article! (probably just the URL address on its own in miniscule font in the corner of a page...but we'll see. Hehe). Sorry.... I just had to get that shameless plug in here somewhere!

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Website created by Rich Hull,1998.