After a frantic distribution of MySpace friend invitations, I now have six friends (granted, only five are human beings). I feel validated. Now I will probably never visit the site again.

Ok, I lie. I will be a tard in the cess pool that is MySpace.

I found that quote on teh interwebs. After having created a profile yesterday and having dug around a bit yesterday and this morning, I tend to agree with that statement. No offense to anyone reading this who frequents MySpace (or to cess pools or tards). Perhaps you’ve found a bastion of brain cell activity that eluded me in my exploration. I had occurred to me that someone of my advanced years would feel out of place in a place populated by teens and early twentysomethings. But there are people there my age. I entered my high school name as search criteria. Out of 330 people in my class, 19 have MySpace accounts and chose to publicize their high school attendance. All but one or two of these 19 still live in New Jersey. I found this interesting. Most had profiles that would befit a 19-year-old. The only person I found who either has a brain or is not consumed by shallowness is Christine G., whom I had emailed a few months ago after having found her website. Basically, I found the same subset of my class that I found a couple of years ago when I searched Classmates.com.

So I put up a MySpace profile because I figured it’s a free way to put myself out there in a way that might possibly attract new and interesting people to my life (or old acquaintances). I’ve met many interesting people through LJ. Unfortunately, while I think LJ has a pretty diverse set of users, I don’t think the same applies to MySpace.

For what it’s worth, if anyone wants to join me in the cess pool, my ID is eitsaot.

UPDATE – Just got my first email. It’s from “Raleigh Downtown Live”. What an absolutely horrid-looking website. It seems that most people who attempt to be creative with their MySpace pages wind up with crap that looks like this.

Aremid: Where are you going? You didn’t even take a shower. It’s still so early. I’m confused.

Me: I’m going to go cheat on you with other kitty cats.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2139555376132383479

I’m so glad we defeated tyranny, so that Iraqis could enjoy freedom and democracy.

If I look outside the window near my cubicle, I can see the ATC lawn filled with a couple hundred young women all excited because there is a SoapNet I Wanna Be A Soap Star event going on today. I’ll pass. I used to want to be a soap opera writer, however.

About a month ago, I mentioned a personal project I’d be working on and gave no details. I wound up abandoning it after a few days. The project was to copy very old pre-LJ journal enties to LJ. These entries date back to 1989, when I was just 13 years old. I kept a written journal between 1989 and 1991, but I had transcribed many of those entries into electronic form a long time ago. Then, a few weeks ago, I copied a few dozen of these entries into LJ. And I made them all public.

Way back when, I had envisioned a day when my journal would be public. It would be published in some form, for all to read. This was pre-Internet, so I had no idea just how easy this would be to accomplish if I so desired. When I wrote in my journal as a teenager, I wrote with the intention that there would be a an audience eventually. I believed that one day, when my life was on track, someone might read my tale and gain some sort of inspiration.

But as I read through these ancient entries, I found myself disliking this younger version of myself. He was whiny and needy, hardly the sympathetic figure I thought I’d be encountering. The reaction I’ve always dreaded hearing from others in response to hearing of my woes, “Just get over it!” is precisely what I thought as I read what my younger self was thinking.

I thought about how some comments about family members or friends could be hurtful if read all these years later, but I concluded that if someone did manage to stumble upon my journal, they would not hold my 15 year old comments against me. The person with the greatest potential to be hurt from reading these entries is I.

So, what to do? I didn’t want to mention this project in here until I had made all those old entries private, which I did a couple of weeks ago. Now I’m pondering what to do next.

I just switched to a new layout that contains a tag list. I realized that I used numerous tags with these old entries that have no meaning in my current existence. I was relieved to find that the tag list displayed depends on viewer’s access rights, so no one will ever even see the ‘mindy’ tag (although I just told you about it, as an example).

So options going forward:
- Keep copying entries; make them private
- Keep copying entries; make them friends-only
- Keep copying entries; make a “preLJ” filter list, and anyone who wants to be on it can request access, although I am hesitant to do that, because I don’t know if I want to know how many of my 16 LJ friends have any interest in reading these entries
- Keep the project on hiatus indefinitely

Just posting to say that I love Aremid and Zellouisa infinitely. Old picture.

That was bizarre, seeing Meat Loaf performing on American Idol with Katharine McPhee. Did I hear right, there’s gonna be a Bat Out of Hell III? Googling… Possibly to be released October 31, 2006. 

On a related note, I bought Chicago’s XXX a few days ago. (XXX stands for their thirtieth album). It was only $9.99 at Target, so I bought it without even a listen. I had read it was their first pop original album since March 1991’s Twenty1. I remember well being quite excited by the release of Twenty1. I bought the cassette at a mall in Cherry Hill, NJ were I was attended the state FBLA convention. None of its songs became hits, but I liked a couple of them. There are one or two on XXX that I like, but nothing’s as good as what’s on Greatest Hits 1982-1989, which has numerous great cheesy love songs and power ballads.

On another related note, a few weeks ago, I bought Barry Manilow’s The Greatest Songs of the Fifties. Some good dramatic key changes there.

I recently heard someone say that Iraq is at a turning point. I thought that sounded a bit familiar.

I’ve compiled a list of Bush Administration turning points in Iraq, using the cool new Google Notebook tool.