Sakura of DOOM

coffee_and_ink says this:

I persevere because I feel an unjustifiable and religious conviction that art is important, and that art includes all the despised genres and media I love, science fiction and fantasy and romance and historical novels and children's books and comics and manga and television and musicals and anime and film, and that if I keep talking about this stuff -- not to tell you that what you think is important is wrong, but to keep talking about what I love and why and what I hate and why -- maybe you will come to think so, too. Or maybe you'll speak up and change my mind; which is an outcome to appreciate, too. (from here)

And rilina says this:

My reading life over the past 2.5 years would have been much poorer if I wasn't on LJ. So to all of you? Many thanks. (from here)

I'm posting this here because I've felt lately that I don't know why I'm writing in LJ. I'm writing entries for all the books I read because I decided to do that last year, I write entries on TV shows to be in fandom, and I blog about my rats and food. But recently, I've been feeling that my LJ is very short on content, or useless, or something. And I say this not to beg for comments or reassurance, but to remind myself that even if no one read it, I blog for me, and I think I may have forgotten that along the way. Either that, or it is the evil Kronk voice of depression speaking.

It is somewhat disingenuous to say that I blog for myself, because I could very well be scribbling away in private entries or my paper journal (which has fallen into a dusty grave of deep booshelf-dom). I don't do this because I love the interactivity of LJ, because I love the meshing of the private and the public, and most of all, because my life for the past two years would have been much poorer without reading people's entries on books, genre, TV, fandom, movies, knitting, politics, rants, all the entries on their daily lives and pet pictures. I love all of that. I've written little bits of my life up and put them out in that great unknown of internet-space (I hate the term cyberspace), and in return, I've gotten book recs and sympathy, friends and looks into other people's lives.

I feel like I'm not much contributing to this larger discussion anymore, that I'm posting just because it's a habit. I've largely stopped commenting in people's journals, and I've been having a really tough time keeping up with everything that's being posted. I just hacked my flist to bits the other day as well.

And yet, even while I'm sitting here and feeling fairly demoralized about my own LJ, I haven't even given a thought to giving it up.

I must think that the things I write about are important and that the act of writing is important. The strangest part is that I've never thought of myself as a writer, especially not when I see so many people on my flist publishing books, writing fic, and etc.

Anyhow, I write about my life and the things I love, and I post it out here, for the entire world to see, because I think these glimpses into people's lives are important. It doesn't solve a lot of problems, but it helps me see more from another person's perspective, it gives me pieces of different worlds that I would otherwise never see. I know that the LJ world is still limited by those who can afford an internet connection and computer and the like, but it's still a broader world than I would have otherwise seen.

I write about books, all kinds of books, because I love books. I love romances and sci-fi and fantasy and YA and non-fiction and chick lit and manga and comics. I will also mock them mercilessly at times. I do this because I care about books; I want them to be good, I want to enjoy them and rec them, not throw them across the room. And yes, I think books are important; words are in my blood and my brain. I think genre is important, I think playing with genre is important, I think guilty pleasures are important.

I write about TV and movies and music and dance and musicals and theater (ok, more the first two than all the others, but still) because I enjoy narrative in any form and because I would shrivel up and die without having this other space for the imagination, for displaying what people can do with their bodies and their minds.

I write about depression because I think it's important to talk about it, and because I dealt with it much better because I knew other people who had talked about it and wrote about it. I don't write about it or talk as much as I think would be good, but that's something I'm trying to work on. And having a circle of people I could write about this to was and is immensely helpful.

I write about rats and knitting and clothes and trees and stuffed animals because I love these things and because I hope someone else out there loves them too and gets a bit of joy out of reading about someone else liking them.

And I write because I like to blather and compose entries in my head.

I forgot what my point was, but... I am trying to take more time with LJ and sit through and actually read, because I hate feeling like I'm skimming. It feels like I'm just floating on the surface of life and not actually venturing in because I feel like I don't have enough time. But that makes no sense, because when I do skim, I'm not getting anything out of it, so that's an even larger waste of time.