I'm a man. I don't have a "diary." Or a "journal," for that matter.

So I've been back in the US for nearly a month now. I've bought and begun using some prep software for the CPA exam, been sending resumes out to anyone I can think of, and now, after finally just pulling an all-nighter on Saturday and then going to bed at seven PM, I've finally managed to get myself back on a slewing schedule that approximates sanity.

This morning, I woke at nine PM after a very strange dream in which I and The Riddler teamed up to fight an army plastic monsters that were taking over the world. I made breakfast, cleaned myself up, and drove out to my school to pick up a copy of my transcript. You see, you must electronically submit a transcript to apply for government jobs, but UMKC policy explicitly forbids giving electronic copies, because somebody might hack the system and steal one, compromising our precious identities. Given that the copies that they print off are, presumably, also electronically stored, I'm not sure this is an effective deterrent from letting ne'er-do-wells learn my GPA. However, for added security, they won't even mail out an unofficial transcript (all I really needed to apply for a job) so at least there's that. Twits.

The upside to all this is that since I was already here, I headed over to the computer lab to see if I could use their scanner. I learned then that my student account was never deactivated, which means I still have access to the free CPA prep software. It only offers practice multiple choice questions, which (as I learned last year) is insufficient to prepare me for an exam, but the practice questions in my current prep software are somewhat insufficient, so this should balance it out nicely, at least until my access gets changed.

And so now, I am sitting in a coffee shop. Blogging. Figured I'd get a head start on being a yuppie. But while I'm here, something about the blogosphere occurs to me.

The above post contains virtually nothing of interest. I yammer on about government job requirements and some exam software, and give an accounting my last few days, which were fairly uneventful. The only thing in the whole post that anyone is likely to relate to is the bit about schools having retarded policies.

This highlights the obvious counter to the common argument against owning a blog: "why would you want to make your diary/journal public?" The obvious answer being, because in those rare instances in which we do treat our blogs like an actual journal, nobody wastes their time reading it anyway. In reality, they're more like soap boxes than anything. A handful of people eventually peruse teem when they've got nothing better to do, and for that reason we technically have an "audience." This means that we can spend twenty minutes typing up a post in which we bitch about our problems, rant about our political ideals, and proclaim our latest mind-blowing, life-altering epiphany, and feel like people are hanging on our every word. While they still usually exist more for their writers than their audience, journals they are not.