Nothing makes it harder to write than the conviction that no one wants to read.

I originally got on LJ by following a bunch of online Buffy fans I liked. (Hi, guys!) I figured LJ would pretty much die out, from my point of view, when Buffy went off the air. It didn't, and I was lucky enough to have my LJ as an outlet when my life began to fall apart.

(I realize that sounds melodramatic. I lost a career that was the focus of my life and a relationship that was very important to me over the course of a few months, and then began to face a steep decline in my mobility to go along with some slips in my mental health. I think "fell apart" is fair.)

Things have continued to be not-so-great, for me, for a long time. Years. When I felt up to it, LJ was my corner bar. I would come on here and "hang out"- read what was going on with people, talk about stupid fannish junk, be social in my own demented and sad little way.

Every time Six Apart does one of their stupid purge tricks, and someone I liked to read starts making noises about not being here anymore, LJ loses a little bit of what makes it worth "coming" here. I don't read or write child porn, but every time Six Apart does one of their stupid purge tricks, I get the message that Six Apart doesn't want riffraff like me and my friends hanging out in their place anymore.

Hopefully, I'll be able to find a new "hangout" and talk about my interests when the mood strikes. It doesn't seem too likely, because most fannish fora have a bag signal-to-noise ratio as far as I'm concerned. There aren't many good places in the "neighborhood."

Six Apart can do what they want with their hardware and their equipment. Everything they're doing is nice and legal. But it still sucks.

As I so often do these days, I'm losing track of my thought. It's very frustrating. I miss being smarter than this.

Anyway, thanks for listening, you all.

Please leave a comment to this post. It will cheer me up. I want to be cheered up.

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Reuters tells me that the "default setting" of the human brain is daydreaming. It turns out later that people "aren't really having fanciful thoughts" but are thinking in a non-focused way about things they have to do later, much of the time. So I personally think "daydreaming" may be a misnomer.

( Whining )

I started this journal at what may have been the happiest time of my life. Things started to go south fairly quickly, but a couple of months there were really good. I feel a certain nostalgia for that time, but I don't think I could repeat it. For one thing, I don't believe I could feel the same enthusiasm for academic work. This kind of nostalgia is, I think, why people say things like you're only young once. But I was something like thirty-two then, which is younger than some but not so young as others. It seems to me that, basically, anything I could do in my early thirties I could do in my late thirties.

I don't think it's impossible for me to be in a happy time of my life again, but it doesn't seem very likely to happen on its own, and I'm not sure what I can do to make it happen. It seems that, for now, I have to wait and hope. Hope is difficult.