Unexpectedly long

[todayiamadaisy]

So, I don't normally post memes and I like to think that's because I can come up with my own things to rabbit on about, but it's really because I'm too wordy. I tried doing one of those 'tea or coffee?' memes once, and it's so hard to choose between two things. My answers were discursive essays, covering the situations in which I would drink different beverages.

Which is just a way of warning people that mockduck tagged me to do this LiveJournal meme and, well, it's a long meme anyway and my answers make it longer, even though I grouped some of the questions together.

How did you come to start your LJ?

I'd been reading a friend's LJ for a while. Then I did a work-related course and the leader planned to create a community on LiveJournal so we could have class discussions and such. That didn't end up happening but by then I'd created my account and decided that I liked it. So I stayed.

How did you find your first friends?

I had one friend right from the start, emma2403 (the friend mentioned above), and that was good. If it had just been me rattling around here by myself, my LJ would probably have been like every paper journal I've ever kept: kept enthusiastically until I got sick of myself and then torn up.

Apart from that, my first friends found me. I remember being ridiculously pleased when someone commented on one of my early entries about finding exciting (for a given limit of 'exciting') things in library books (and if that sentence teaches us anything, it's how little my content has changed over the years). She became my second friend and my friends list was immediately enlivened by her constant updates on (a) how her polyamorous arrangement wasn't working for her, (b) how much she was into polyamory despite that and (c) how her son was a genius but was having a lot of trouble at school. She was quite an unhappy person who seemed to think the whole world was against her and I found reading her entries quite stressful after a while.

My third friend was, I'm fairly sure, tabouli, drawn by the fact I had (and, in fact, still have) Antonia Forest's Marlow family novels listed as an interest. She is also the only person I know through LJ that I've ever actually met (or defictionalised, as she put it).

After that, it's all just a blur.

Are those first friends still on your FL?

The polyamorous lady isn't. Just as I was debating whether or not to defriend her she stopped posting, which made the decision much easier.

How long have you been on LJ?

Five years come 1 April. This is my 706th entry.

Do you have more friends or communities on your FL? Do you do a lot of friends cuts? What would make you un-friend someone immediately?

I have a smallish friends list, but still more friends than communities, which are transient depending on my passing whims. I don't often defriend anyone and I agonise about it for ages first and even then it's because they've stopped posting or we have absolutely nothing to say to each other. It goes the other way too; I rarely just randomly friend someone without reading them or knowing them through a friend's f-list first.

I really don't think I would defriend someone immediately. Perhaps if someone asked me to? Or made a dramatic post about how much they hate me? I wouldn't want to stay around if that were the case. But otherwise, I'm not given to sudden bursts of activity like that. Politeness and sloth are my watchwords.

What do you like in an LJ friend? What do you dislike? Have you been caught up in a lot of LJ drama?

Something to read? I like hearing little bits of people's lives: what they're up to, what they're thinking about, what they're looking at. If I was in charge of Twitter, the question would be 'what's on your mind?'

As for what I dislike, well, I'm not keen on those journals that have nothing but meme results and I tend to skip over fan fiction, even if I'm familiar with the fandom it's from. But then, I probably wouldn't friend an all-meme-and-fanfic journal in the first place.

And no, I've not been caught up in any LJ drama at all.

Do RL friends and family members know you have a journal on LJ?

The only family worth mentioning is my mother and she doesn't know. She thinks all internet people are crazy stalking murderers, so if she knew about this journal and one of you did turn out to be a crazy stalking murderer, well, she would be the queen of I-told-you-so. I mean, she is already, but this would push her right over the edge.

I've mentioned it to friends, but I have no idea if they read it or not.

Do you also have Facebook and if so, what do you prefer – LJ or FB? What about Twitter? Do you blog on any other sites?

I've never seen Titanic and I'm absurdly proud of that (I hear the boat sinks). Similarly, I don't have Facebook, despite a number (three's a number) of invitations or requests or whatever they are. I think what set me against it was reading a newspaper article by a keen but defensive Facebooker, patronisingly explaining that we should all have one because everyone has one. My reaction was something along the lines of 'and if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you do that too?' and from that moment Facebook was dead to me. Also, I'm not keen on the idea of finding people I was at school with. I live in a small town and I didn't like most of the people I was at school with; I don't really care what they're doing now but if I did it wouldn't be hard to find out.

I have a Twitter account (todayiamadaisy, obv.) that I've never used. No, that's not true. I did use it but I realised that the only times I did so was as an excuse to avoid doing one particular thing and, honestly, a page of tweets saying 'avoiding data entry into Quickbooks' really isn't worth it. I deleted the entries but I kept the Twitter account because you never know when it might come in handy.

I have another blog (not called todayiamadaisy), visible only to me, on which I occasionally put my appalling poetry. It's a quality control measure: I find what looks good at the time written in my nice handwriting looks much worse several months later in black and white. Oh, and I have todayiamadaisy over at Vox: created during one of the 'the sky is falling!' LJ scares and never used. That's where I'll be if anything ever happens to this one.

How often do you check in on LJ?

Two or three times a day, usually in the morning and evening. If I'm connected to the internet for a while doing something else, I'll leave the window open and refresh every now and then. I also check at lunch time while I'm at work (my boss watches live feeds of horse races during the day, so he's fine with the rest of us doing a little bit of personal stuff every now and then).

What do you rarely or never post about? Why don’t you post about that?

I don't often post about exactly what I do during the day, because it's really not that interesting. Mostly it's get up, go to work, come home, pootle about a bit, go to bed. That's not going to sustain a journal for five years. I also don't often post about people I know (work colleagues excepted), just in case they're reading.

Have you ever thought about deleting your journal?

No. As I said right at the start, all previous journals have been torn up but not this one. It turned out all I needed was an audience.

Why did you choose your current username? Have you ever changed your username?

I've always been todayiamadaisy. Today I Am A Daisy is the name of a song I like by Deborah Conway. It's a bouncy acoustic number, a bit of a positive reinforcement song - today I am a daisy but tomorrow I will be Vincent's sunflowers; today I am a waitress but tomorrow I will be an astronaut - but I mostly like it for its tune. It came to be my user name because it was the first option I tried that was available. It occurred to me later that I could have just put words I like together - silverjellyfish and owlandpeacock are the two that stick in my mind - but I'm quite happy to be todayiamadaisy and I wouldn't change it (unless requested to for copyright reasons).

The thing is, I think of my LJ has a personality of its own. In person, I am not nearly as upbeat and cheery as the this journal makes me seem. I did one of those Myers-Briggs tests that types you by your blog entries, and the Daisy was classed as being the complete opposite of my normal results. In particular, the Daisy is an extrovert and I am most assuredly not. Which is not to say that my LJ is a lie; rather it's me with many of my various neuroses pushed aside and I like that. It's a better me. And if I had a different user name, perhaps this journal would have a different personality. I - and world - will never meet the Jellyfish.

If you’re looking for new friends, how do you find them? Are you taking new people on to your Friends List just now?

It's not like a job vacancy. There's no seasonal 'taking on' of friends. It's more like, when the opportunity arises, I'll do it.

This seems like a good place to mention that when I post polls, often I get responses from a couple of people who aren't on my friends list, suggesting that they're long-term readers. And that's lovely, but I have to say: go on, friend me. I don't bite. And if you friend me, you'll get... um, what will you get? Oh, you'll get to read about Angela, who only ever gets mentioned in my friends-locked work-tagged posts. So that's a bonus.

Finally, tell us the reasons why you keep an online journal.

When I was at school, my best friend and I wrote each other letters in class. I suppose a lot of kids do that, but we took it to another level: we wrote exercise books. That is, we spent all day together at school, we'd write letters to each other in the odd class we had separately, we'd go home and talk on the phone for a couple of hours, then we'd hang up and write a few pages in our exercise books. I'm amazed we had time to do anything else. The books would take a couple of months to fill and we put all sorts of stuff in them: maps of our houses showing the location of everyone in them at the time, lists (the 500 cutest people in the known universe), games (she still complains that I put 'robin' on the list in my Christmas find-a-word but forgot to put it in the puzzle itself), paint samples, amusing pictures from Smash Hits magazine...

We each wrote ten volumes of every thought that went through our silly heads. I still have mine (that is, her books to me) and I love them.

And this, I think, is an extension of that.