Willa's Journal - I'm real

~~I'm real~~

Saturday, November 23, 1996, 10:00 a.m.

I got some very disturbing mail last night. I wanted very much to comment on it, but I couldn't because the information I had was "advance warning" and hadn't been made public. I have refrained, for the most part, from commenting on other people's journals here in mine, but I think this development deserves some discussion.

If you regularly, or occasionally, read Jessa's Journal, or even if you don't, please go read the truth, and then come back here.

When I first discovered the Web, the pages that intrigued me most were the personal home pages, put up by people just like me, or nothing like me sometimes, but real people. Their thoughts and dreams and ideas. I trusted that they were telling the truth. And while it could be argued that since I didn't know them, it didn't really matter whether they were telling the truth or not, it did matter. I ran across a few pages that appeared at first glance to be autobiographical, but when I discovered that they were fiction, I stopped reading them.

It's sort of like a story I read recently about USA Today using a model in a photograph to illustrate a news story without disclosing that the photograph was a "recreation." At the time I thought that was a silly distinction. But now I realize that the issue is not whether the photograph was real or not, but the fact that people reading a newspaper have the right to believe that the things they read there are true unless they are told otherwise.

People don't like to be fooled; they don't like to feel foolish. It's one thing to enjoy fiction, but I want it disclosed at the outset that what I'm reading is fiction, and not biography.

The worst thing that will happen from this, in my opinion, is that it will cast doubt on the rest of us. It perpetuates the myth that everyone on the internet is pretending to be someone else, that you can't trust anyone to be who they really are. It's unfortunate.

That's all I'm going to say about it here. If you feel like you'd like to discuss this development with me, please feel free to send me mail.

Oh, and one last thing--I'm real.

I had a dream last night about a chair that shattered into tiny pieces when it fell. I looked up the symbolism of chairs in my dream dictionaries. One book said that chairs symbolize the fact that the dreamer needs to sit down and ponder something, a wish to take time out for reflection. Another book says that a chair represents power, as in a throne, or the person that holds that power--consequently, your personal power. It can also, depending on the type of chair, represent comfort, support, refuge, and possibly your attitudes or feelings about a waking situation.

In my dream the chairs were not visibly fragile, but they weren't solid, either. They were the type of chairs with spindle backs. When I saw that they were broken, I hoped that I could glue them back together, but I found that they had shattered into too many pieces to make that possible.

I think this dream is a metaphor for this journal situation. I hope we can glue ourselves back together after this.

Later - 4:00 p.m.

Today started out as a pretty nice day, weather-wise--just a little cool, fairly dry, sort of overcast. Bob tends to give me "assignments" when he leaves for work on the weekends, with no real belief that I'll do them, but he tries anyway. Today he thought I should go outside and work in the back yard, cleaning up the dead plants and putting the pots and things back from where the painters moved them. [Interjection: Why can't men ever put anything back where they got it?] So I probably should have taken advantage of the nice weather, because by early afternoon it had turned into a miserable, drizzly, cold day and if the temperature drops everything will probably be covered with ice in the morning. Oh, dear, remember what happened that time I said something about snow . . .

Anyway, my parents came over around 11:00 to bring me birthday presents--a green pottery coffee carafe (I think that's what it is, or maybe a pitcher with a lid), a pretty wooden music box, and a big "W" keychain. They stayed about an hour, then they left and I went to the library, then to the card store and the bookstore, where I did a little Christmas shopping.

Today's birthday present from Barb: A tiny (about 2" tall) gargoyle made of absorbent stone and a bottle of lavender essential oil. You drop the oil into a reservoir in his back and it scents the room. I love fragrant things, and lavendar is one of my favorite fragrances. The card says that the name lavendar means "to be washed," and that it was burned in households and temples to protect the inhabitants from evil. So the little gargoyle is sitting on my table right now, protecting me.

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