Girls with Journals: Why I’m Not a Real Writer

I always wanted to be the type of girl who kept a journal.  Someone who wrote droll daily observations in a pretty, Paisley diary from Barnes and Noble, thinly-lined.  Something a Jane Austen character would daintily clutch, while wearing some Georgian empire-waisted dress, cleverly sitting down in a sunny morning room to jot down flawlessly engaging blurbs.  (In perfectly formed handwriting, of course.)  Or maybe one of those brown leather notebooks with a strap around it, like Indiana Jones.  I’ve had both.  And some others, too.  All empty.

Well, not empty.  Exactly.  Once in awhile I’d start writing what I thought I should be writing down – not what I truly wanted to write – but things which, when later reread by me, seemed false.  Unnatural.  Contrived.  And so, disappointed by my inability to express even the simplest of content in a remotely entertaining way, I gave up.  Every single time.

But I still wanted to write stuff.

So I would write myself little notes on backs of receipts.  In margins of books.  On the TV Guide.  I would jump up out of a deep sleep to pen important thoughts to be later transferred to one of my multiple incarnations of a journal.  You know.  The empty one?

Because I wanted to be a girl with a journal.  I just couldn’t get it together.

Then I started to text myself.  I got an iPhone and started to write little yellow-lined notes, like Facebook statuses to myself.  I love technology.  Can I even write on paper anymore?  Do I need to?  Not when I can text myself such witty nuggets, in random ADD-driven bursts of absolute genius, and fueled by long sips of Starbucks.

Things like:

• Btw, scale, I am NOT 150 pounds.

• Yes, George O’Dowd, I do.   Really, really, in fact.  Want to hurt you AND make you cry.

• Spaghettios are inedible without the meatballs.  Hands down.  (Auto-corrected to indelible – hey, they may be that, too – but I never tried to write with a meatball.  Yet.)

• Got 100 robo calls today.   Ok.  At least 20.  Or 2.  I got 2.  (Which auto corrects to something like “hot 100 robot allies” – huh?)

I give up.  Or, as they say nowadays, FML.  The reality is this:  my Facebook is my journal.  Or, as translated by my iPhone:  XML my FB is my joy.  WTF.

Anyways.  Yeah, that’s right – I said anyways.  Deal with it.  I’m not a girl with a journal.  Or Jane Austen.  Maybe Jean Shepherd.  In a Regency era dress with a plunging bosom.  IDK.  LOL.  Those dresses ARE cute.

I’m not a real writer.