October 16-18, 2001 — And all I ever say now is goodbye

My room smells awful right now. Of laundry detergent, mostly. The box said to use three laundry detergent cubes for a heavy load of laundry, and I was washing a month's worth of dark-coloured t-shirts (twenty-one, for those keeping score), which I figured qualified as a heavy load if there ever was one. The shirts ended up coming out of the wash covered in little specks of detergent and smelling rather strongly of soap. I'm hoping the smell goes away on its own when the shirts finish drying. And since that won't happen until tomorrow, I've opened up my window in an attempt to let some of the stench out.

Now it reeks of laundry detergent in my room and I have goose bumps.

It has been a long day. Actually, it has been a long three days, but I'm going to work backwards, and today was the longest of the three.

The vaguely described circumstances that have been causing me to keep a non-public journal for the first time in a couple of years seem to've come to a close. Not without me feeling fucking awful at the end of it all, but hey, we all like closure. Or at least that's what I'll keep telling myself until this ache subsides and I can go back to feeling numb inside.

Things have actually been quite confused since the weekend, really. It amounts to fairly strange circumstances since everything relates to parts of August that I never wrote about in my online journal, and part of me thinks that writing out the back-story would be in very bad taste at the moment. And another part of me is too scared. But having explained what was happening to only my computer's hard drive, I was rather short of people to talk to about current goings-on.

Which of course led me to AIM. It seems that if I leave AIM on while logged in as antigregsucks, the name I have posted on this site and on Makeoutclub, I'll have a good half-dozen people that I don't know talking to me within 30 minutes or so. Then it's simply a matter of picking the most coherent person (with points deducted for replacing "you" with "U" or for using excessive emoticons). Once I've filtered out the riffraff, I tend to go off on long-winded rants filled with rhetorical questions and circular arguments as a bewildered AIM user from across the continent wonders what they did to deserve this.

I'm convinced it's much better than therapy. And I made a friend in Maine. Funny how these things work out.

In any case, I'm not sure that I actually feel better now, but it's a bit of a weight off my mind. Almost a week of not knowing was killing me.

But yes. In less vague news, I am quoted multiple times in an article discussing online journals in the University of Ottawa student paper this week. I answered the questions in a bit of a daze on the weekend and probably would've rambled a touch less in retrospect, but I'll somehow deal with it. I sound snobbish talking about why I decided not to use Livejournal and Diaryland, but it should be noted that neither was all that established when I started this and that I didn't know that either existed until later. Y'know, just for the record. And I mean, they're fine for most people, but where would I be without the joy of spending four consecutive (mostly sleepless) days re-coding my journal archive every six-to-eight months?

In the article, I was pleased by the fact that my use of "could've" was preserved (I'd really have something to celebrate if there were an "I'd've," though), and I found being referred to as "Sullivan" a bit disconcerting. Anyway. Go read it, if you like. (Also for the record, the idea wasn't that I was getting the jump on the hate sites about myself that I assumed would spring up once I was famous; instead, my theory was that so-and-so-sucks sites were indicative of fame and so by starting a gregsucks.com-style site, I would be projecting part of the image of online fame without ever actually attaining it. Sort of like that bit from American Beauty, "In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times." Except with fame. And a bit more convoluted. Oh, never mind, I'll just change my about section to something more coherent...)

So then. Five hours after I began (and became distracted from) this journal, my room still smells a lot like detergent, but it's less cold, and a lot more humid. What I've learned: drying clothes that reek of detergent in a cold room with the doors and windows closed is not a wise idea. A life lesson I'll never forget...