Other People's Stories

 Weekend Assignment #19: Tell us about an entry in someone else's AOL Journal or blog that really left an impression on you in the last year. Why does it stand out for you? Include a link to it within your entry (come back here and link to your entry in the comments).

Choosing someone else's journal for this was easy.  There are a handful of AOL journals I check almost daily, for amusement (Mrs. Linklater's Guide to the Universe), for poetic inspiration (Interactive Haiku), for righteous wrath (Who Cares What I Think?), for an alternative perspective of life in Tucson (The Peach Pages), and to connect to the rest of AOL-J Land (By the Way, but we're not suppose to mention that one.  Shh!).  But the one journal that's really made an emotional connection with me is Becky's Where Life Takes You.  I've never met Becky, but in the short time we've been reading each other's journals, we've each remarked more than once how much we seem to have in common - not in details, necessarily, but in core experiences and attitudes.

Choosing which specific entry to talk about here is trickier.  There have been two, and I'm just going to have to talk about both of them.

The first entry of Becky's that really got me was called Reunion.  Riffing off something John Scalzi said and her own upcoming 20th high school reunion, Becky explained why she won't be going.  That in turn inspired an entry from me (which I won't link to here - you can track it down if you really care). My entry inspired one by my friend Julie in her non-AOL journal.  Cool, huh? The common element was the idea that for many of us, high school was not a place of happy days and deep friendships with people we'd love to see again.

The other amazing journal entry in Where Life Takes You was called Geek. If I have to choose just one entry, this is the one. It was the story of how Becky went from junior high school outsider to clandestine rebel and cool kid without being dragged down by her "bad girl" mentor. (And she still didn't connect with her high school classmates.)  Nothing like what she describes ever happened to me (unless joining a Star Trek club constitutes being cool and a rebel--which it doesn't), but it could have.  I kind of wish it had. It's a really effective and affecting story, and brings up all sorts of memories and possiblilities for roads not taken.  Read it.

Karen