August 23, 1997 (6am)
Today's my wedding day, I've been up all night with insomnia, and still can't sleep.
So I've decided to try getting up for awhile again and write for a bit to see if it
will help me relax. Maybe having spent the night on the computer, or the example of
the online journal of a friend, Misty, made me decide to start an online
journal this time instead of more of my illegible chicken scratches in
one of my paper journals, despite the fact that it seems unlikely that my
ramblings would be of much interest to anyone but perhaps a few friends.
There is, of course, the added bonus in doing this online that I don't get writers'
cramp, don't ever have to try to read my illegible scrawls later, and am
more likely to keep this up since my paper journals often lapse for long periods
of time and I'm more apt to try to keep up one which others might be reading.
But what I find most attractive about keeping an online journal is that it reminds
me of the paper journals that my best friend, Kazumi, and I used to send
back and forth when I was in college. We'd been inseparable in high
school and decided that instead of just writing letters to each other,
we would get a journal and take turns writing in it, mailing it back and forth
at intervals and taping pictures into it that fit our mood, or whatever.
And we would title each journal volume, too, I remember. Sometimes poetic
titles, sometimes just silly, ridiculous titles. I remember one of Kazumi's
titles was "The Most Beautiful Distance Between Two Points".
And so, in the spirit of those old journals, I'm going to name these pages, changing the
titles periodically as if we were filling up paper journals, and name this first part
"Dreaming Among the Jade Clouds," and will write in it in hopes that it
might be a fun way to keep in touch with old and new friends. Although everyone is welcome
to read this, I have to warn you all that I tend to run on at horrifying length in my
journal entries, and that I'm not likely to be very entertaining to any
but close friends. So if you're still interested after this warning please
do read on. ;) And if you're interested in reading other online
journals, please visit my friend Misty's, whose example gave
me the courage to go ahead and start this journal. And now I'll continue this day's entry on the August page
[which is this page, I've moved it from where it originally was.] so I don't clutter up the index too much. ;)
August 23, 1997 (6am), continued [once from journal index]
I woke up late yesterday after having spent the previous night in an html frenzy
putting together my wedding page so that
I'd have a place where my friends and family could attend and where I could
have a fancy wedding. If you'd like to see it, please visit Ginkgo's Fairytale.
Anyway, I then proceeded to do all manner of thoroughly uninteresting things,
including reading Miss Seeton By Moonlight by Hamilton Crane
(a mystery) and having dinner with Mark at our favorite Chinese restaurant. Actually, the book was interesting and dinner
with Mark is always interesting and enjoyable, but the *other* things were generally uninteresting. Whatever.
I also spent some time ranting and frothing at the mouth waiting for the Sprint connection
in Chicago to come back up again so that I could get through to my server, having been locked
out from my mail and webpages during the prolonged outage. Late
that evening my childish verbal outbursts at various innocent inantimate objects were rewarded and Sprint
started working again, reconnecting me to the cyber world to which I'm so shamelessly addicted.
And it was like Christmas. Friends and strangers (i.e. soon-to-be-friends, grin)
had sent me lots of beautiful gifts--cyber cards, cyber flowers, and lovely
custom-made graphics gifts. (If you're a stranger to the concept
of cyber cards and flowers and are curious about them, check out my 
