Re: Set up LiveJournal community?

I conducted a small natural experiment on "do you really 'know' someone whose
journal you read?" Several female aikido practicioners keep journals on the
Women in Aikido website. Some are just logs of "what did I work on today?"
but some are highly narrative, talking about personality conflicts,
inner fears, etc. There is a little cross-talk among the journals: I
might say "I reacted to X just like so-and-so reacted to Y." But there
is a convention of not writing direct responses to journal entries, though
discussion threads on the site do come back to the same issues.

After about two years of reading each others' journals and participating
in discussions together, two of these women and I shared a smallish hotel
room for several days at an aikido event in Florida--the first time any of
us had met in person.

I knew these folks. No question about it. I could have predicted the ways
we'd get on each others' nerves as well as the ways we'd get along well.
It was interesting seeing them in person--they didn't meet my preconceptions
there--but it didn't lead to any major re-evaluation of our relationship.

I thought this was a pretty good test because the event was something of
an emotional pressure-cooker, so we were not as much on guard as
if it had been, say, a beach vacation. I think every one of us
slunk off the mat on the edge of tears at least once. So I figure that
if we had fundamentally been strangers, it would have been quite
noticable.

Mary Kuhner mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxx
.

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