Dear Diary

Even if it’s not all that regular – or hasn’t been lately –, I have managed to write entries for my weblog (blog, of course) rather continuously for a few years now. Four, to be more precise, I started in October 2006.

My blogs are not my first try at writing a diary, though. You see, when I grew up, more precisely during my teenage years which nicely cover most of the 1980s, writing a diary was just the thing to do for a young girl. Around that time, I still wanted to be like other girls – more precisely like the girls in the novels I read then. So I managed to convince my parents I needed a diary during our summer vacation when I was around 14. The problem was just this: my life was (and still is) a lot less interesting than that of all the girls in the novels I read then. During the vacation, while we were travelling around and doing sightseeing, my life was interesting enough and with a few pointers from my father, I managed to do some really interesting entries. But once I was back home and in my normal, everyday life, I didn’t find anything interesting to write about and grew tired of always writing ‘nothing interesting happened’ in my diary. So I stopped writing in it and instead used the lock to hone my lock-picking skills. They grew, by the way, even though the number of entries did not.

Today I know I could have had a lot of fun with the diary then (besides lock-picking, which was funny). I just would have had to write down my dreams, my ideas and my rants in it, like I do in this blog. But at that time, I didn’t realize that and thought it was just for my real life – which was boring.

But what is it that makes girls so interested in writing a diary? And why are boys mostly immune to it these days (or the days of my youth)? There’s a TV series I really like (and no, it’s not “Vampire Diaries”) which is centred around a teenage girl and her rather sarcastic entries into her various diaries: “Mein Leben und Ich” (My Life And I). So what about diaries and girls? From a rather Freudian point of view I can, today, understand the whole ‘Horse’ issue. A huge, steaming, strong animal between your legs? Why should girls not be enthusiastic about this? But diaries?

My very own theory, one that will surely not hold up to any scientific test, is this: it’s a left-over from the past, the time when women, and especially girls, were mostly ignored whenever they weren’t useful. You know, cooking, having children (male for preference), cleaning up the house. Whenever women or girls were not doing such useful stuff, the men weren’t interested in what they thought (they weren’t interested all the other times, either). The times women could talk to each other (as their fathers, husbands or brothers weren’t interested in talking) were limited, of course. So they wrote their thoughts down (if they could write, of course). That was where the diaries came in.

Even today, most people are not listening to what teenage girls think, so it’s only logical they’re still writing diaries. Other people write blogs, no matter which age they are. I write a blog and I’m nearing my forties, my father writes a blog and he’s well into his sixties by now. Blogs are a nice new twist to the diary. While the diary holds the secret thoughts and wishes of a young girl about to become a woman, the blog holds the thoughts of a person (no matter which age and gender) directed at the world.

So, dear diary, that’s it for today. Or tomorrow. Or until I manage to write a new post for my blog.