Mono no Aware has moved to Guerrilla Semiotics. Please update, thanks, and sorry for the inconvenience...

I am writing these words with the finality of betrayal that one usually feels when switching soccer teams - or whatever Australians do instead. After years on this address, the time has come to abandon Livejournal for something swankier, more manageable and, ultimately, more transparent.

We LJ-ers were always a bit more tribal than the other blogging communities. We could befriend one another, filter our posts so that only our friends could read them; it was, in one word, all very high school. I've had Mono no Aware since 2001, and it has been many things. For a few years, while I was moving countries and cities more erratically than I change music taste these days, Mono was literally my most permanent address, the best place to find me. I made friends on LJ, not to mention partners.

To cut the sentimentality short, that's the end of that. Livejournal has been changing hands since, roughly, 200...5?, and every change has been for the worse. It wasn't so much the lack of perks, but failure after failure of LJ to provide the minimum acceptable working conditions for a self-respecting blogger, from search and archiving options to design freedom. And then came the advertising... The moment I looked at this URL from a public computer, and found it smothered with advertising I had never asked for nor approved, I was going to leave.

I will continue writing on theatre and dance on Guerrilla Semiotics, an infinitely more pronounceable URL (if you have ever seen me trying to explain the spelling of 'misonou' and 'aware', you will be as relieved as I am), and a much more disciplined design commitment.

At GS, you can find my last articles: reviews of Shaun Tan and Jason Lutes's graphic novels, and an article on Woyzeck, currently playing at the Malthouse.

So long,
Jana

The time of waxing personal in this blog may have passed. Thank you all. Please disperse peacefully.

2006 was the year of the mega-entry; of the power-entry, if the wink to the 80s pop music is of any relevance to you. It was the year of sociological deconstruction, and one of frustration. While indexing the blog posts, new categories have cropped up: urbanism; theatre; and in-depth conversations with books (an even spread of fiction and non-fiction). 2006 was angry, still angry.

2006 and 2007, in couplet, have been a prolonged psychological experiment on the writer here present. I will not consider 2008 to have started until my own political status in Australia is resolved, and with it concluded my battle with my university. Too many aspects of my life currently depend on that decision: work, study, extracurricular activities, place of residence. Self-betterment will need to wait until I am an independent agent of change in my life again.

All this should be taken as a matter of fact, not some deranged existential lament. I have grown beyond deranged; deranged was very 2006. Recently the question of maturity came up, and with it two opposite answers: for one, maturity entailed recognising the singularity of each existence, recognising the secondary characters in one's life as the protagonists of their own; for another, maturity was precisely the recognition of oneself as the principal actor in one's own play, not merely a side-kick to those around. The conclusion, perhaps, is that we need to take care of ourselves and each other equally. The other big phrase that kept nudging for attention has been that of family: after years of cultivating an extended family of bloggers, lovers and fellow globe-trotters I've ended 2007 acutely alone. Not feeling lonely, but sitting, nice and sober, at the end of the world, in a pool of deep, dark, inescapable solitude. If anything, 2008 will need to be the year of rebuilding relationships: with my strangely reinvented parents, with my dearest friends on the other side of the world (on all the other sides, to be exact), with the people in this city. That is my forgotten New Year resolution, together with a self-betterment project (cultivate beautiful fingernails!) and an attempt at self-preservation (write more and better).

At this point the text was interrupted by an international phone call to comrade Pjotr (because the beginning of a new year is the time when old friends are checked on), and happy life in 2008 now appears a bit more possible, in between films, books, theatre and promises of globe-trotting in good company at the other end of it. I am left thinking, if my old friends, my new friends, and my new self can all be contained in a room (a boat, a car or a park bench) at the end of 2008, it will mean the end of this prolonged confusion.

The most important thing for me, since 2006, was coming to the sober realisation that I am unlikely to be psychologically deviant. That I may be over-stressed, cruel and unnecessarily verbose, but I am not on the path to insanity, despite what may be said in heated arguments. I wonder if it is a common thing to doubt one's own sanity. I am, in any case, relieved. 2008 will be a year of taking responsibility for my own emotions and the decisions they underline. I may as well start believing all that empty flattery.

The previous 7 (counted) weeks of my life could be labelled the pursuit of form: what is a cover letter, a form, an official phone call, or even an essay, but an attempt to justify life (in this case, an existence, a right, a need, and an opinion) by coating it in shiningly accepted, proper, unthreatening form? The academic essay, in particular, sad and useless like light beer, champions the cause: Structuring, Clarity of Expression, Use of Examples/References, and Bibliographic Conventions obviously outnumbering and weighing over Coherence of Argument and Comprehension Displayed on the tick-the-box cover sheet; all terribly important-sounding and civilising. Like the school uniforms everyone argues improves the study and the morale. If there is a climax to this sad story, it is in the strengthening my belief that the Anglocivilization pursues form above all else, in order to tame, control, and uniform, the chaos of life.

And therefore I renounce, in front of you all, any obligations to proper form I may have on my own journal. I refuse. End.

art: 17/01/2005 18/01/2005 books: 20/12/2004 06/06/2005 film: 17/11/2005 16/12/2005 festival reports: 09/08/2005 22/09/2005	photography, Croatia: 03/01/2005 25/07/2005 09/08/2005 21/11/2005 photography, Italy: 27/02/2005 14/04/2005 02/05/2005 21/08/2005 24/08/2005 photography, projects: 24/04/2005 26/04/2005 photography, family album: 27/03/2005 19/05/2005 02/09/2005 30/09/2005
personal: 21/02/2005 26/04/2005 07/08/2005 personal, Zagreb 2005: 16/09/2005 19/09/2005 22/09/2005 23/10/2005	discussional, Croatia: 12/02/2005 07/05/2005 11/09/2005 02/03/2005 discussional, Australia: 14/11/2005 17/11/2005 discussional, just plain: 06/06/2005 06/06/2005 didactic: 18/01/2005 13/07/2005 03/12/2005 24/12/2005

The clean-up of 2005, almost a year overdue. Quite against the tradition, this time I decided to leave some of the entries open to the general eye, due to their literary or photographic merit. I also left the entire Zagreb,2005 accessible; in retrospect, that was probably one of the happiest times of my life. Thank you guys (you know who you are).

I'M SORRY for being inaccessible for such an untypical amount of time. i'm fully aware that (1) i owe an explanation and that (2) i'm very late with it. with the clear risk of sounding impossibly egotistic, i assume someone might have gotten a bit worried when my journal got rolled up and put away. (by which i shouldn't be trying to imply my journal is of greater importance, but only, perhaps, that i would find it worrying if it happened to a journal i knew well.)

I APOLOGIZE to anyone who befriended me shortly beforehand, hoping to find a nice daily read and possibly find out more about a life. it was unfair from my side, definitely. i would have given out a warning, but, you have to understand, the circumstances didn't allow. i also apologize to anyone whom i made worry, and i should have contacted and calmed down, just for the sake of good manners. the circumstances didn't allow, in the sense that i was the first to need to be calmed down.

THIS WAS A SYMBOLIC measure, in the way that most of human interaction is symbolic (ask yourself how often life demands from you to demonstrate in action the eastern and western frontiers of your feelings towards somebody, something), but it as also extremely practical, and, in a way, nothing i've ever posted in this journal had such an immediate result. there is something weird in this; a representation of life affecting life itself. but we don't live philosophy, and we don't live in logical, abstract worlds (otherwise mathematicians and philosophers would be the wisest men).

if i'm new to you, and you're nevertheless struggling to get through this text (my entries tend to be longer than necessary), then i should probably explain a couple of things. if you've known me for a longer amount of time, it might still help if i don't assume you know everything. so, let me tell you that.

I'VE BEEN writing in this journal since may 2001, with breaks never longer than a couple of days, at times reaching worrying and adolescent quotas of 5-6 entries a day. i only learned how to protect entries from general public in 2002, and during this i've had other journals too. now deleted, but copied & stored on other computers.

i learned to read & write at the age of 3 1/2, and we lived near a children's library. when i was 13 i found myself in a life without friends, without people and on my 14th birthday i had short stories waiting to be read, stories that were me. when i was 15th, giving stories to kids to read was my main method of communicating with people. and a year later, i created this journal, for reasons that were superficially very different, but. in the end, perhaps it wouldn't be wrong to say any web diary employs the role of my teenage short stories.

I'VE NEVER lied to my journal. i've occasionally omitted things to protect people dear to me, and things bigger than me. i've occasionally let things out in other places, written notes or whispers over cups of coffee or under blankets. but keeping myself dissected, systematically and in one place, is my way of dealing with self and things that employ self, like life. and since i've developed this unhealthy habit of leaving pieces of myself around the world, journal has become my home, the headquarters of me.

add to this only one important detail more, and i might assume you have a complete picture. i've spent most of the time between 2001 and now building myself from the scratches i was, scattered among short stories, and i eventually reached the decision i can only keep my self myself if i take responsibility for my self's actions. and that excluded the idea of privacy. that excluded the idea of shame.

PERHARS NOW i have a text i can point to the next time i want to say how important this journal is to me. and that rolling it up, putting it back inside the closet, isn't just a thing i do after dinner, but before reading in bed. that this affected me in many ways, the most unexpected being reading, day by day, past four years of my life. that it was self-inflicted torture in the purest sense of the phrase, and, just like any torture, i came out knowing something new.

DELETING THIS went strictly against some of the principles of life i've developed between 2001 and now. it took me a while to understand. but it was however a necessary move. because life isn't clean, logical nor abstract, and correct theorems don't always work. despite my best intentions, keeping it public, keeping it accessible in future would have probably brought just harm, to people dear to me, and to me. and i'm not powerful enough, not just yet, to protect people dear to me from harm. nor to expose myself to the harmful ways of the world completely.

SO THIS IS starting again. i'm jana. hello.

The Diary Project:

30 July 2004

"One is so much more authentic the closer one is to what one has dreamt of being.

Writing these daily notes is becoming for me a way to exorcize the daily fears, which are recurrent, precise, accurate, self incriminating and immediately forgettable. Despite this I write them down, because sometimes truth is better than nothing."