  Apparently the main server is down; I can't connect to the Internet. Since I cannot work without the Internet - it has become one of the crutches of my working life - I am sitting here, typing up a journal entry. You know you're addicted to journalling when something happens and the first thing you think is Gee, this would make such a great journal entry . A journal: a catalogue of days, an album of memories. The nice thing about journals is that you pick-and-choose what to remember, and how to remember them. Someone pointed out to me once that you don't report the facts accurately in your journal, not really - but that's to be expected. I forget the precise term for it, but in the social sciences it's accepted that first-person accounts are biased, due to the teller's presence and/or participation in the event. Therefore reading journals comes with that caveat - that you are not reading an objective account of an event, but a subjective one. Despite its inbuilt inaccuracy as a memory-keeper, I love my journal - both the online and offline versions. As I suspect most people do, I keep two versions of my journal - the online blog for regular events, and issues that require an audience; my offline, handwritten journal for personal issues, stories that are too personal or painful to tell while there are eyes watching, and random ideas that are too incoherent to post online. A friend of mine speculated once that I must have a secret journal, where I write down the spicier details of my life.
Alas, no - my offline journal is actually less exciting than my online one, as I write in it less often (the really spicy details, to tell the truth, all lie in my private e-mail). The tales of my life that are untold remain untold, because I lack the determination and maturity to find the words that will translate them effectively from memory to story.
Being molested in my own home by a close friend when I was nineteen, my dreams about abandonment and falling and cold electronic societies, the time my paternal grandmother rejected me as a granddaughter, being harassed in school when I first returned from Bangkok because I could not speak Tagalog properly, various memories of being abused as a child - so many stories I have to tell, and yet I refrain from doing so because I cannot tell them yet without sounding like a victim. Pardon my pride, which is one of my besetting sins, but I cannot - I will not - I refuse to sound like a victim in my own journal.
It's been almost fifteen years since I first started journalling - as that stereotypical ten-year-old girl with her pastel, daintily-padlocked San Rio diary and multi-colored pens, scribbling earnestly to "Dear Diary". I never thought I'd make it from then to now, still writing, but in a medium that lets me wander freely through others' thoughts and concerns, and correspond with people whose interests and passions mirror mine. With that - Belated happy birthday, synesthetique - conceived as luminae and renamed halfway through, you have always been a haven of sorts. Here I am strong, and witty, and articulate; wrapped in the membrane of my prose, I can retell the painful, the irritating, the frustrating, and the glorious moments of my life without resorting to useless things like tears or tantrums. Here I dissect myself - who and what I am right now, vis-a-vis who and what I wish I was, and find a way to make the edges overlap. Here I find a forum for the issues that move me, and people who challenge and support the things I say.
I am hovering on the brink of my mid-twenties, and I no longer start my entries with "Dear Diary", but here I am yet, journalling. Four countries, several houses and apartments, and multiple love lives later, with a larger vocabulary and a more complicated heart - but still me, and still with that inborn need to scribble things down. I wonder if I'll ever stop needing my journal. I hope not. Later: Kathmandu and child goddesses, for Yaz. 
