Millieu

Last night I dreamed I was walking with someone that I did not recognize though it definitely felt like someone I knew. She did not look like my best friend at work but in the dream this person gave me the same feeling as her. As we walked, she was telling me about the way she had wanted to relate to other people during the pandemic lock-down; how she had tried to talk to people as though they were dating, but it never worked, it never achieved the desired effect. 

It wasn’t that she wanted romantic relationships with these people. It was only that dating conversations feel like they matter in a way that other conversations do not. Speaking with me often felt like dating, she said. 

I think the dream was about LiveJournal. Because we were talking about relationships that felt like more.

_ _ _ _ _

I have wanted to write about this for a long time now. 

Writing is not as easy as it once was. The first two paragraphs above ~ they have been re-written six or seven times now. I don’t remember having to do that. Writing has become more difficult for me. 

Sometime after January 10th this year, I was continuing the Sisyphean task of trying to manage my email when I came across a notification in my “Social” folder saying that someone had granted me access to a Dreamwidth account. Over the past few years I have been trained - I have been conditioned - to treat all electronic correspondence with suspicion. If it is unexpected: is it phishing? Is it the opening move in a pig-butchering scam? If it is expected: is it genuine? Is it AI-generated? In all cases: is it monitored? Who is monitoring it? Will the matter have repercussions to my work or, more painfully, my personal life? Will other people get upset if I participate? Will I be discouraged from doing it because of the risks I am taking? 

When you read that italicized word above, hear it in a bitter tone. That is the way it sounded to me when I added the em-dash break. I heard in my mind, “Over the past few years I have been trained …  no, I have been conditioned…” and I heard and felt bitter resentment in the word. 

You should never click links in an unexpected email, my cybersecurity training has told me. It has been about a month since I received the Dreamwidth notice so I cannot remember if I did it right - did I navigate to the platform in a fresh browser window? Log in correctly? I hope that I did. I did not recognize the account name, but something about the profile picture seemed familiar. I know I hadn’t seen that image before, but the elements of it resonated with me, like when you see an AI generated image that you know is fake but you can almost tell what it is supposed to be - a photograph of a fox against a grey background that appeared almost orange in colour, almost as if it was animated. 

My February 17, 2017 Facebook post says, “Sometimes I feel like some of us used to live in a small town called LiveJournal, and we all moved to the big city [of] Facebook, and now we wave to each other in passing…”. I can easily name five people I follow on Facebook because of LiveJournal. Two of my Instagram follows are also people from my LiveJournal Friendslist. But the transactions are very different. For all the reality that is captured in photographs and the interests inherent in shared third-party content, I take it in like I am watching broadcast streaming content that isn’t particularly meant for me. And while I know that LiveJournal posts were not intended for me particularly, why do I remember feeling like they were? 

On January 2, 2025, my Facebook feed reported that someone I had never met died unexpectedly due to double pneumonia. Chris Hearn’s friends were posting their condolences, sharing stories about how they knew him, their fondest memories of times spent together, or when they saw him last. I had never met Chris. And I didn’t take the opportunity to express my condolences because it felt strange to explain that I was posting because I read yetibuddy. But the impulse to write something has never left me. 

Last week the Outreach Engagement Specialist at our technology and innovation department sent me a link to our intranet’s event promotions page where she writes a work blog about goings-on. I read an entry about the culture of creativity where she profiled members of the latest creative cohort by asking, among other questions, “Did you write about your teenage angst in LiveJournal?” I sent her a comment in TEAMS “You only wrote in LiveJournal as a teenager? LOL”. She replied, “I  L O V E D  LiveJournal” and we proceeded to share experiences with the people we “knew” but had never met. 

All of this was floating around my milieu when I looked again at that Dreamwidth notice and then read, “I want to pretend this can be just like LJ back in the day.” And the elements of the profile picture snapped into meaning.