What is worse: reading someone's diary, or cheating on a current partner with an ex?

You don't have to mention it. You don't *have* to do anything. But just the fact that you know about it *is* going to change your relationship.

xpost: caught doing either!

did you read the diary because you had an inkling she'd done it? because ... ach, fuck. like dan says: call her out.

xposts

"er, no. no, honest."

"well why did you write about it in your diary?"

"you read my diary? how dare you?"

"how dare you shag your ex!"

this is watertight, i think.

Cheating is definitely worse. But still, reading a diary is a broach of trust. But nine times out of ten when someone leaves their diary easy enough to be read, it's kind of like they want to get caught.

Dunno. Sounds pretty horrible, though.

xpost & beans: no but he is around and she is still friends with him, as I am still friends with my ex.

Gear OTM. "Are you OK? You've not seemed yourself since I got back."

I'm surprised noone yet has mentioned that Arab Strap song about reading your girlfriend's diary and finding all about the secret sex life you really didn't want to know about. I think it's called "Love Detective", although I could be wrong.

haha i think that maybe because arab strap are shite!!!! ;)

er xpost

(by 'back' i mean ass)

We slept in this morning and she had to get ready in a hurry - no time for her usual attention to detail - and she ran out the door, slamming it behind her, leaving her keys swinging and jangling. I stayed in bed until I heard the downstairs door shut, then peeked through the blinds and as soon as she was out of sight, I went for the keys. She never tried to make a secret of the box or the fact it was locked or even where she kept it. But as I said at the time - "If you've nothing to hide, why hide it?"

It's one of those wee red cashbox things and she keeps it in a drawer by the bed, under some pictures and books. Every key she has is on the same keyring - it took me a while to find the right one. I don't know, I suppose I've had my doubts for a while. There's been hushed phone-calls virtually every night, her friends stop talking when I come in the room and they look at each other, and I don't know, it's just a feeling. Anyway, I eventually found the right key and it fitted perfectly in. I put the box on top of the bed and opened it up...

There were these pictures of friends and ex's, letters, postcards, doodles, nothing bad - and then I found some sort of sex diary and I went to the latest entry. It explicity detailed a recent adventure up the park with a boy she said she had forgotten about...

And it got worse as it went on. The dates never made sense, there were people I had never even heard of. Eventually I had to stop reading it because I started to feel sick. So I put everything back the way I found it, shut the drawer and phoned you. See, I don't know what to do. I keep having fantasies about leaving her dictaphone under the pillow or following her when she goes to work. I've been lying about where I'm going, just in case I can bump into her.

... sorry, this isn't helpful.

or "I wish my current boyfriend and my ex would have hott manlove, it wd b k-awesome"

(I can imagine mitigating circumstances for shagging an ex, I can't imagine any for reading a diary)

First line, in Swedish, below. Don't think I got this one wrong. Other stuff which followed (which I'm not going to post) is more complicated & so I'm not too sure of the whole situation.

"Hade sex med [name of ex] nu i eftermiddags."

Your other advice, Ken, is useful.

Or what if she made the whole thing up, and wrote it in her diary on purpose because she suspected you might read it while she was away?

I already considered this!

See, I would say it was the other way around.

I'd probably dump someone who read my diary. But I'd DEFINITELY dump someone who cheated on me.

xxpost

next thing you'll be saying it we need an electronic device that would replace books. let's give it a catchy name like "incinerate"

this is all about what kind of person you are--self regarding interior people are going to get diary keeping, non-reflective types (i count myself as one of these) really arent

next thing you'll be saying it we need an electronic device that would replace books. let's give it a catchy name like "incinerate"

haha I'm cool in principle with one media replacing another, but I tend to be one of those who bemoans what gets lost in the switchover (ie, records that never got released on CD, books that won't get transferred to electronic devices, etc.)

i am a pretty interior/reflective person but just wouldn't be able to get into this, partly due to lack of privacy as a kid like elmo said. but i can definitely see the value. you can even make one on your electronic device!

given the choice, I'd rather read diaries completely unintended for public consumption than the modern equivalents which seem geared to it.
(e.g. kurt cobain's diary vs. courtney's blog)

just to be clear I only brought up the pre-printing press/electronic media angle insofar as that pertains to diaries as HISTORICAL documents. Like, it might be useful for someone in, say, the Roman Empire to keep a diary, because shit didn't last forever back then and not everybody could write/preserve their thoughts and it was hard to tell what would last through the ages and what wouldn't. So preserving something for posterity made sense. But now every little teeny tiny thing is fucking documented and catalogued and preserved, removing that particular rationale for keeping a diary. I don't care about digital vs. analog media or whatever, that's not the point.

yeah, i really feel old when i see what younger people will publish online. i'll feel slightly embarrassed about stuff i wrote in a private journal as a teenager, and that's for an audience of one.

But now every little teeny tiny thing is fucking documented and catalogued and preserved, removing that particular rationale for keeping a diary.

who is doing this for the particulars of your life if you don't do it? this argt is dumb. it's not like the romans knew what they didn't have. fuck, no ipod! better write about these gallic wars going on or w/e.

my ex used to grab my phone and read my texts

she also frequently searched my chatlogs & email archives for her own name if i happened to leave my gmail open on my computer

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, October 7, 2009 2:36 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this would make me go apoplectic

fuck, no ipod! better write about these gallic wars going on or w/e.

lololol

my point was that now we don't need to glean what's going on in history from the particulars of anyone's life, since current events are pretty well documented in all their minutiae at this point.

your ex is an ex for good reason.

the particulars of most people's lives don't really matter when it comes to posterity, hate to break it to ya

x-post

they don't? i remember when the lewinsky scandal was trailing off, and the starr report included all these emails btw clinton and That Woman, and they included all this cultural minutiae about movies and songs and The Gap and other 90s ephemera. there was a historians roundtable on pbs and someone said 'man, we'd kill to know this kind of stuff about lincoln now'

this is a long winded way of saying, the "particulars of most people's lives" does matter to posterity! it IS posterity, isn't it?

the president and blowjob-giver /= most people

that is to say, the key phrase in your quote is "ABOUT LINCOLN"

blowjob-giver /= most people

i know, it's tragic

what a disaster for blowjobs

but knowing things about the particulars of ordinary people's lives at that time gives us a context in which to understand people like Lincoln, surely?

honestly, my ex copied his letters for posterity because he fancied himself a clever guy and thought he'd be a celebrated writer someday

but knowing things about the particulars of ordinary people's lives at that time gives us a context in which to understand people like Lincoln, surely?

do you really think in this particular day and age that diaries are going to be the sole source of this kind of crucial historical information gtfo

the point is that you as diary keeper don't know what it is that will be important or noteworthy to future readers, if it is. we'd love 'daily life' stuff about all past eras, and that's exactly what we don't have and has to be reconstructed by conjecture. this idea that people don't need to document themselves because... why? blogs? lots of media? whereas they did before, doesn't make sense -- people in the past didn't self-document out of some lack of other media or a desperate wish to broadcast themselves into the future. they just did it, like people now do it. i mean, the two aren't even related really.

people in the past didn't self-document out of some lack of other media or a desperate wish to broadcast themselves into the future

oh I think you're wrong about this

this would make me go apoplectic

― butt sound insanity (gbx), Wednesday, October 7, 2009 8:30 PM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark

it did

I'm just sayin, you keep a diary nowadays don't pretend like you're doing it for posterity or for subsequent generations. You're doing it for yourself. What that says about you, hey I dunno...

if you want to come up with reasons to dislike people, okay, but that seems like a dumb one to me

I didn't say I disliked anybody, just that I don't understand the point of keeping a diary in this day and age

cuz really what do I care how other people spend their time by themselves. do whatever you like!

I feel like in the past, keeping a journal has kept me from letting my anxieties and neuroses explode onto everyone around me, because it's like somebody's listening to my concerns (but it turns out that person is me!). So I definitely see the practice of writing as a useful release, rather than the importance of the record itself. I think one of the reasons I've stopped is that the internet is full of places for me to go on at whatever length I feel like, but I've never reached the same level of candidness because there's always the possibility that somewhere out there, somebody's reading it.

but I've never reached the same level of candidness because there's always the possibility that somewhere out there, somebody's reading it.

smart woman!

i just don't get the "in this day and age" thing - in the past, sure, there were bureaucratic diary-keepers recording for later generations in their posts and people who thought they were going to be celebrated writers someday, but there were also a bunch of people who just wrote diaries for themselves, like people just write diaries for themselves now.

and the stuff that's useful to us from those bureaucratic diaries often isn't what they were intentionally recording "for posterity" -- a friend of mine's been using 9th-12th century diaries to get climate change information.

i like the idea of keeping a diary but i'm incapable of doing it-- every time i try i get bored halfway through an entry, or forget to write again, or find myself unbearable and give up.

and the stuff that's useful to us from those bureaucratic diaries often isn't what they were intentionally recording "for posterity

my "in this day and age" point is that this stuff you refer to is now widely available and recorded in other, non-diary formats.

and my point is that just as they couldn't predict what posterity would want to find out from their diaries, we can't predict what use current diaries might have to our own posterity.

while that's true, but I have a hard time believing anyone's private diaries contain unique, crucial information that will be totally unavailable from other diligently archived and exhaustively comprehensive sources

well, depends how postmodern you want to be about your question i guess. maybe sometimes the individual non-expert opinion will be wanted.

9th-12th century diaries to get climate change information

zoiks, this is awesome (though I'm a little curious about the form said diaries took and where they're from, given the obsession in Europe at that time to turn any pieces of paper/vellum into more painstakingly illuminated copies of the Bible, with anything else clearly being a terrible waste. I'd much rather read a millennium-old diary, obv.)

maybe sometimes the individual non-expert opinion will be wanted.

don't worry, there's plenty of those too. there's this thing called the internet...

If I thought someone mistrusted me enough they would consider reading my letters/diaries/email (and you can kind of tell when things get to that point) you can bet your bippy I'd put maguffins in there, as Suzy mentioned. Call me malicious or whatever, I dont care really. Who's to say thats not what happened to the original logged out OP? I mean who would write something as bland and straightforward as "had sex with [blah] this afternoon" in a diary anyway? Yeesh, its not minutes from a meeting.

Meh maybe thats just me though.

Maybe could be a GTD enthusiast?

Haha.

I'm just sayin, you keep a diary nowadays don't pretend like you're doing it for posterity or for subsequent generations. You're doing it for yourself. What that says about you, hey I dunno...

Mormon church it's a freaking commandment to keep a diary SO your posterity can read it. Mainly read your testimony that the church is true and awesome! So it's this bittersweet lol looking back at journals of mine from age 15 where I was first getting held underwater by depression, and five pages of suicidal moaning ends with "but at least I know the church is true and that Joseph Smith was a prophet of god!"

If I ever do a diary now it's in the form of a wordless comic about my day. Happens maybe 3x a year.

not quite a diary, but the chris ware sketchbooks are a lot more interesting than the acme novelty stuff that eventually comes out of them.

It is a very, very weird feeling, feeling you have to cover up parts of your inner life so as not to shock your future great-great0grandchildren.

I used to keep an oldschool diary, but in actual fact, amusingly, it *did* get me into trouble (but the guy was already snoooping through all my shit and being an asswipe and I wasnt cheating on him.. UNTIL all that started happening and pissed me off, but long story). Then I sort of began to write journalistic nonfiction instead - observational stuff, notes for short stories, trying to hone my craft (or kid myself I was).; Then I got a livejournal and then it all got kind of boring to bother with.

. So to the Privy Seal, where I signed a deadly number of pardons, which do trouble me to get nothing by. Home by water, and there was much pleased to see that my little room is likely to come to be finished soon. I fell a-reading Fuller’s History of Abbys, and my wife in Great Cyrus till twelve at night, and so to bed.

Trayce, it totally worked - and my mom also learned what is 'unreliable narrator' - but I also pointed out that she probably didn't want me digging through HER stuff. School had already toughened me: sometimes the posse of evil roach-clip loser girls in my jr. high would lift a journal or some other work in progress and I'd be like 'oh I was waiting for the staged performance whoops I forgot none of you can actually read, were you stealing my shit to learn?'

I wish I'd thought to do it earlier in my life where it may have at least had some entertainment value!

lolz Abbott you are the bestest.

things I have learned about the Mormon Church today: the Deseret Alphabet, diary-keeping requirements

Yes, Abbott rocks!

:O

:D