September 25, 2001
Be Careful What You Wish For

So, yeah, the majority of my entries from 2000 are gone. I have only the beginning and the end of the year. The middle is missing. It's like it never happened. Like I was gone for nine months, or something. Away. Out of the country. Missing. In a coma. Then, suddenly, I'm back, writing like a mad fiend. Like nothing's changed. Like I never went away. Of course, I didn't go away. I wrote like a mad fiend on an almost daily basis from February through October 2000, but all those words, thoughts, plans, aspirations, rants and ramblings are gone. The memories are gone as well. Most memories I don't even remember having, so they're obviously not terribly important. (And, if they are, I'll remember them eventually.) There is only one group of memories I'm sad about losing all the details to: The memories of my trip to New York City in April of 2000, to meet up with my Forumite friends, and see Sir Derek perform in "Uncle Vanya." Gone. Sure, I still have the photos in a scrap book, and the basic memories of arriving in NYC, being amazed by the tall buildings as every redneck tourist is, I'm sure, finding the hotel, eating a bagel at a nearby diner, meeting up with Carol, Taraza . . . everyone . . . Carol and I having a chance meeting with Sir Derek on the street in front of the Roundabout Theater when we went to pick up our tickets and she stopped to have a smoke, eating the best pastrami on rye in the world a the Carnegie Deli, wandering around a clean, almost sterile,Times Square, buying white carnations for us ladies to wear so we could be recognized as a group. Then the next day, having lunch before the show and meeting Mary, Gloria, Silvia, Joanne . . . everyone, everyone, everyone . . . seeing "Uncle Vanya," and having Sir Derek Jacobi on a stage so close I could almost touch him. His voice sending shockwaves through my body until I'm vibrating, ever so slightly. Humming quietly. Bathing in his powerful aura. God, he is so beautiful! He controls that stage and everyone on it. He controls all of us. He controls what we see, how we think, what we feel, when we feel. He is amazing.

Sorry, I got lost there. Remembering. Anyway. The pictures I still have. I've sent out a request to my Forumite friends to see if any of them saved or printed out any of my entries, particulary the copy-and-pasted forum posts we made from NYC: my and Carol's meeting Derek on the street, our initial impressions of "Uncle Vanya," and his performance. The later Forumite Reviews posted on the now-debunked Hotboards forum. I had saved all those, but now they're gone. Maybe someone still has them, and I can recreate my "Vanya" pages. If not, I can still recreate some of the pages, just not all of them. I can recreate my entire site. I'd been contemplating scrapping the entire thing anyway, and starting over. Remember when I said I was thinking of doing that? That's why I should be more careful what I wish for. Basically, now I'm starting over. From scratch. With the exception of the Vanya stuff, however, I find that I'm not as upset about losing all those lame entries as I am about all the work that went into making it. The html coding, setting up tables, sidebars, finding graphics sets to bring some colour to my journal entries, writing them. A lot of hours. A lot of work. Gone in just a few moments.

I'm well pissed at Crosswinds about this. I've been mad at them before, when things have gone wrong, or when someone has screwed up and messed things up, but I have been understanding and patient, because they didn't require ads on their pages, and I appreciated that. But, this is too much. Too much. I no longer care if my readers are disturbed by ads on my pages or pop-ups. Yes, they're annoying, but if a page is worth visiting, you will live with it. Maybe my pages aren't worth it to some. That's fine. This journal is no longer being written for any of you, although I'm not opposed to sharing it with an audience. This journal is for me. It always should've been, but somewhere, somehow, I lost sight of that, and began to write for an "audience" rather than for myself. This sudden deletion of a majority of my journal might be just the thing I need to make the changes I felt I needed to make earlier. One of the reasons for my "Summer Vacation" was to think about what to do with my journal. I had even begun going through my entries trying to decide what I should leave available, and what I should just get rid of. Well, the decision was made for me, basically, so it's time to just continue on with whatever it was I was planning to do. Newness coming here soon.

Cheers!
Hez

Reading: Body for Life by Bill Phillips.
Listening to: Sarah Brightman CDs, Tori Amos' new one: Strange Little Girls.
Writing: Actually, re-writing lost html coding, and new journal entries.
Pondering: Change, rebirth, renewal, recovery.
Gratitude: That I didn't lose everything. That I still have the pictures I took in NYC, and still have some very vivid memories of that lovely weekend.