I don’t know, maybe I’m too old and cranky for teen angst. I used to love it; I delighted in all the drama that my friends came up with and was thrilled when I had my own to bring to the table. Something about lonelygirl15 rubs me the wrong way, though. It might be her twitchy face and frequent use of fillers. “Um, I’m a lonely girl…I’m 16…but I don’t want, um, you to be all, um, stalky, so I won’t tell you where, um, I live, just say a million times that, um, it’s really boring. And make some more faces. Um.” Ugh. It could be that I’ve known about the series for a while, since right around the time it started getting big, before people were seriously questioning how real it was. I never watched it, as initial descriptions made it sound stupid and I had lost interest in the whole blogging thing after my own blogring had gotten too histrionic, even for my tastes. Plus, it got really outlandish, like the Internet version of “Passions”, another relic from my middle school days. When it was finally revealed to be a hoax, I wasn’t totally surprised, but I’ll admit to being disappointed. It’s sort of sad that this public diary, one that touched a lot of young people, was all written by adults with marketing on their minds. I guess this has a lot of implications: our manipulation by the media, the ease with which we can re-invent ourselves on the Internet, our voyeuristic interest in the personal lives of others/our solipsistic belief that people give a damn about the mundane happenings in our own lives, our need for a human connection in an increasingly remote and mechanical society. I don’t really want to talk about any of those, though; that’s fodder for a research paper that I am too lazy to do. Basically, I hate lonelygirl15 for being angsty in a way I like to think I’ve left behind; but I also hate her for abandoning it for some stupid occult theme. If someone is going to have access to the minds and emotions of thousands of people, there should be some honesty in there; teen bullshit is largely no more real than anything lonelygirl15 said, but at least it has belonged to everyone.