He used to have a journal of sorts a few years ago that he
just stopped updating. He made it clear that it wasn’t a blog because he wasn’t
really interested in trying to think of content. I could see where you could
define a blog as topic driven and a journal as well, “I ate too much cheese and
now I can’t poop,” type of daily stuff. That’s how my friend explained the
difference.
Apparently when he sold his old computer to his former
roommate, he forgot to clean out everything. One of the things he forgot was
his online journal with its ‘password remembered for this site’ option turned
on. He said that the guy edited the title, changed the email, got rid of the
pictures, and made it his own. Except he left the online journal as it was and
continued to add to it.
My friend only discovered it because the two of them had two
friends, one them a really good friend of his and the other one really good
friends with his former roommate. So when the one guy says, hey, you should
check out my buddies blog, because by this time it have morphed from a journal
to blog, he started to recognize some facts and figures. Not letting on about
his suspicions, he asked his friend if he could email him the link.
When he forwarded that link to my friend and told him what
he suspected, he was stunned. Not so much that his former roommate had done. He
wasn’t surprised to hear that because I guess the guy was a lazy malcontent. It
was the fact that this dumbass was passing what my friend called his boring
life off as his own. I guess the sad fact is this; the fact that eating too
much cheese and not being able to poop may actually be a step up from where
someone sees themselves.
So after a couple of angry emails, a few heated voicemails
and apparently one face to face showdown, the guy took down the blog and
promised to never pose as my friend ever again. The tougher conflict though was
that my friend kind of took it as an odd sort of compliment. As a result, he
took a deeper look at all the different elements of his life. Then he started
to understand why his former roommate stole his identity.
He gets along with his family and every year they try to
make time to see each other not just for the holidays, but during the year. He
said that when they get together for Thanksgiving, they have a game that they
play where they have three boxes. In the first one are the 12 months of the
year. In the second one are four pieces of paper, numbered one through four. In
the third box are places that everyone in the family has agreed they would like
to visit. Before Thanksgiving dinner, while the turkey is resting before being
cut, they have a family meeting and they draw one piece of paper from each box.
And that is how they decide on the family vacation for the coming year. They spend the entire dinner, eating and making plans and dreaming of all the fun and adventures that they'll have.
And that is just one example of how this guy lives his life.
There is a sense of being connected to the people in his life. There is an
acceptance of the unknown. There is a sense of adventure. There is plenty of
gratitude. There is a solid foundation of friends that care and family that’s
there. As I put it to him, who wouldn’t want to have all that? And as he
reminded me, sometimes we just need to look a little deeper at ourselves to see
that we already have everything we need.
I used to have a friend that passed my stories (as well as others') off as his own. I caught him doing it many times and he'd just say "A good story is a good story". I disagree with the excuse.
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