Dear Diary...

February 13, 2008

Blogging, It’s definitely not something I thought I would ever do. As far back as I can remember, I have been completely horrible at keeping diaries. I would get one as a gift or pick one I thought was pretty in the store when I was younger, and for a couple of weeks I would keep up with writing in it. I would sit down every day and begin “dear diary…” then proceed to recount the events of my day, what new way of bothering me my sister had discovered, and which boy I had a crush on. Then I would hide the diary and not pull it out for months on end. Looking back on old entries, all of it seems so trivial and I wonder at how it could have all mattered so much to me back then. Why would I want to recount the everyday events of my life? What purpose would it serve to anyone? One of my old diaries would mean nothing to anyone who picked it up and read it now, but what would history have recorded if Anne Frank had felt the same way? In a Brit Lit course I’m taking we recently read excerpts from the diary of Samuel Pepys. If I’m going to be honest, I hated it. Pepy’s entries for the most part bored me to death recounting business transactions and dinner parties he attended with people whose names meant nothing to me. but then I thought about it; if Pepys hadn’t written down every painstaking detail of his life, we wouldn’t know as much about the quality of life in the 1600’s or have as many details about the Great Fire of London or the coronation of  Charles II. I think that if Pepys were alive today, he would be an obsessive blogger. True, he wrote everything in a sort of shorthand that no one else knew, hinting that he didn’t want others reading it, but blogs offer anonymity.  Pepys never seemed to show any remorse about his affairs and I think he would have taken advantage of the opportunity blogs would offer him to brag about his affairs without having his name tied into it.