I've been reading a lot of online diaries these days. For some crazy reason, I was zooming about the interspace and fell into the black hole that is www.pamie.com - it used to be squishy and now she's back and I spent the ENTIRE weekend getting caught up. Unbelievable how reading someone's diary exposes their universe.

Which makes me think that my universe is kind of dull.

Anyway, there are a million squillion great diaries in this crazy world and not nearly enough time to read them all. Sometimes I curse my lack of foresight- I shouldn't be doing this nursing thing, I should be writing some sort of sociology of diaries and blogs thing. Then I could spend all day reading other people's lives and call it "research." yup yup.

As I was cruising around at the speed of DSL connection, I became more and more focused on a particular goal. I wanted to find a diary written by another almost thirty year old Indian. not the east indian type, more the native american first people type. Did you realize that it's totally impossible to find diaries when you actually want to find a specific one? Or a specific theme? I searched around and found one teenager who stopped updating a year ago. And me. I found me. But even I was pretty hard to find- I need to change my profile so that other people could find me if they wanted. But I don't want certain specific mom-like people to find me if she wanted. That would be DANGER.

Why is that? Why aren't other Natives writing journals and sharing their lives with the anonymous many? Are we too busy trying to feed and clothe ourselves? Maybe we aren't as focused on the I that creates the drive to publish this fairly self-indulgent genre. Theoretically, we're a community-based people. Theoretically, but what about those people like me who grew up in a city-ish listening to DEVO and AC/DC and then other great groups and we were urban and had more white friends than indian friends? Where do we fit in? And why aren't more of us journaling and then making our journals accessible?

I'm just hung up on identity these days. pardon me.