A cartoon depiction of the author, wearing a hoodie and smiling motd.co

Please use that keyboard to talk about your life sometimes. Your real life. Not just the canned version of life on which we slap adhesive labels like happy or sad, poor or rich, employed or unemployed, “eating lunch” or “hatin’ life”, “it’s complicated” or “serial entrepreneur,” “meh” or “whatever.

Merlin Mann - Making the Clackity Noise

I have some friends who still write about their real life (shock), on Livejournal (gasp), and what they produce is seriously what I consider “the best of the web”— funny, sad, and totally revealing. A lot of it is unfortunately marked private for various personal reasons, but everything Merlin says here is so right. I’d like to get back in this habit— finding the difference between writing personally about boring things and writing personally about real stories from their life. (Big props to Erin and Jim and Bill— post some public entries, people, so I can quote you too)