...and I couldn't have done it without Mr. Coffee...

(April 01, 2001)

Jungle Sweet Jungle has been online for one year exactly. Yay me. I shall raise a tiny plastic cuplet of cherry NyQuil and make a toast, to me. Then maybe I'll make some toast, for me. (I'm still sick with what I'm calling the flu).

(Raise your cups and mugs and glasses and and cans and stuff, 'cuz this is the toast):
Reflecting, via the archives, over the events of the past year, I realize that I originally started this online diary to sort of chronicle an everyday sort of life and see what came of it. I was inspired to start one after really digging someone else's for awhile, but it's not like I had a plan or anything; I really just wanted to learn about hosting a website, and I wanted to get myself writing "for real" every day by "warming up" with a foray into the Jungle. The name "Jungle Sweet Jungle" gelled from a few different sources. First, I started the diary right after having read Holtz' Gen X book "Welcome to the Jungle," at the same time I was starting to write regularly again after so many years and that made me remember something: the now-defunct magazine that bought my first published story (for fifty bucks, ha) was called "Hobo Jungle." And from the phrase "it's a jungle out there" and from whatever-- my life has always been a crazy quagmire of wild crap and it's what I'm used to, it's home. So the name just seemed to stick.

So I started the diary, and eventually I formulated a secret hope. My secret hope was that, much like the personal letters of an Emily Dickenson or a Jane Austen, all bound up in book form, my own personal JSJ subject matter, language, politics, interests, pop culture references, and even the form itself (online diary? Hello, could it BE any more Gen X?) would serve a loftier purpose: Maybe, taken as a whole-- like the aforementioned letters--- my diary entries could build a full, layered, interesting insight into the mind of a regular Gen X American girl. Woman. Girl. See, that's exactly the kind of identity conflict I'm talking about that gets explored in these virtual pages. (Feminism. What a bitch).

Now, a lot of online diaries detail the diarist's day-to-day reality in an I-woke-up- and-took-a-dump-and-went-to-work-and-had-a-smoke-with-Jill-she's-so-hot kind of way. Some diarists steer clear from the daily business of life altogether and just give general, grand emotional meanderings that may or may not reveal character, temperament, and attitude. (Actually, these kinds of diaries always sound like whine, whine, whine to me. Who cares, shut up, is what I find myself saying).

I guess I want JSJ to be a kind of amalgamation of those two approaches; looking back over the entries, I see that sometimes I succeed, sometimes I utterly fail. But the overall effect is okay. Some entries have since turned into longer, polished pieces that I'll polish for like, five more years before I send them off to fiction magazines for rejection.

So it's been a year; areas of improvement for the next year? One thing that I realize I didn't really do this year is write about the really important things I care about, the things that are going on in the world, at the time they're happening. I never really wrote about the Presidential election, the big storms that hit the region this winter, the energy crisis, the arrest (finally!) of Slobodan Milosovich, the earthquake in India-- I had to pull over because the NPR broadcast made me cry for those people, did I mention? I did not mention. Or, I often neglect to write about the less global, more me-centric things that show me a thing or two about, say for example, the Somerville Police Department. (There was a whole car-being-towed fiasco that Hub and I endured, which included everything from persecution to extortion). I didn't write about any of that. Another thing I think I'll do in the next year is post some of my fiction--- like that first story ever published I told you about a minute ago, and the longer pieces that result from the Jungle brain-dump entries.

So here's to a year down. May your mouse-hands tingle with joy.

Cheers. (clink)