The first saying:
Journals have an odd way of being about their authors, and not about oneself, one's own journals excepted. For a reason which may be remedied in a future version, of which I plan to be an early adopter, posts in other people's Livejournals often contain material entirely unconnected to, or
even oblivious to the existence of the reader. This is true even when the LiveJournal post mentions things like the exact same color of sweater that one liked in the on-line catalog, the same town in Nebraska that one's late great aunt taught third grade scholars in, and, oddly, even when it turns out the poster of the journal has emotions, interactions and even a real-life wholly unconnected with the weblog process.
The second saying:
Often, the greatest gift one can give in Livejournal is to read. The second greatest gift is to read and write a comment bearing some remote but not didactic relation to the subject matter of the post. Rarely, one is called upon to re-order, revise or remold another's life, which one can do with gusto only when invited. Curiously, however, journal post authors demonstrate a propensity to want to run their own lives.
The third saying:
Eggs sometimes break on Livejournal. Eggs break in any human interaction. As with real-life, though, breaking, scrambling or even parching eggs is not really the point, except at Waffle House.
The fourth saying:
If one reads a Livejournal by someone who writes things one does not like to read, then often in that livejournal one will find posts that one does not like to read. This fact is a triumph of empirical science. A great failure of modern science arises when some experimentalists read material they know will cause hurt, disagreement, or pain, and yet expect for some reason this time will be different. People get to choose what they read, and there is no doubt a fascination in reading veiled insults of one's own person. Yet science tends to show that if one reads something that someone wrote as a dig, then the dig sometimes digs.
The fifth saying, with a strong dose of non-koan-ish opinion:
Correction, "putting x in her place", strident debate and even strikingly successful pithy put-down have an odd way of feeding trolls rather than vanquishing them. Don't feed the trolls. Don't imagine that troll-feeding changes the world. No troll was even vanquished through a livejournal comment. Troll dolls are more fun to look at than trolls are to debate with.
The sixth saying:
No matter how well you "know" someone you read but have never met, you don't fully know them. Sometimes you don't know them at all. No matter how little you know someone you read often but have never met, you know them far better than you imagine, and sometimes far better than some of their real-life acquaintances do. This contradiction fuels wonder, awe, dismay and addiction, but,sadly, it does not make Pangburn's chocoloate millionaries calorie-free.
The seventh saying:
Some folks who write journals of pure fiction imagine their subterfuge is undetectible. Yet so often those journals are the easiest to spot. The human nose for storytelling is a keen scent.
The eighth saying:
It is a great privilege to get to read someone congenial's thought and wanderings.
The ninth saying:
If one avoids spelling and proofreading sufficinetly assiduously, the resutling sense of abashment will preserve one from the stark tempation of making of pdf of one's journal.
The tenth saying:
The best weblog relationships help one to understand the sublime joy of platonic compassion and mutual concern that help one understand, just a little, those entirely epistolary relationships about which one reads. If one is just a winking planet, saying, in essence, "I care", that's not a bad thing--we all need a wink from the Heavens sometimes.