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Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers. My name is Starli, and yes that is my entire real name that is on my birth certificate. No, my parents were not hippies. Online I go by the name "Inez", and a lot of people offline also call me Inez. I'm 24 years old, although i will probably tell you i am 25. I keep forgetting. I was born in the midwest, but moved a lot throughout my life - probably 20 + times. Places that i've stayed at for longer durations are Detroit & Ann Arbor, MI, Chicago and Dallas. I'm an only child to a couple of nuts of the pecan variety, and I have a cat who is on antidepressants. I go to school full time and work full time. I am a double major in Journalism and Graphic Design. I have a boyfriend of 2 years who thinks he must eat pork since he's puerto rican and is obsessed with transformers. Why did you choose this username? Well, it just kind if came about. I first got on the 'net around 1995 or 1996. At that time i was pretty clueless about what the internet even was, as were most people. I started with AOL as my internet provider, and I had to create a screenname. I didn't put much thought into it because i was wanted to see how the hell al this stuff was going to get zapped to my computer. Plus i had about 3 pages of things that i wanted to search on. So I chose my favorite name, Inez, as my handle. If I ever have a child and it's a girl - I'll name her Inez. It's the spanish form of "agnes" and it basically mean "pure." Pretty comedic considering that i don't really fit the name, but it has kind of gotten it's my personality behind it and a lot of people associate the name with me now, so it just stuck. Why do you keep a diary online? It originally started with me being obsessed with having my own website, but not knowing a lick of html.I was convinced that i could have a nice page with a template that random places offered. I started a community at MSN that i didn't tell anyone about and realized two things - not knowing html sucked and I really liked to write about my opinions, things i encountered and other random stuff. I stumbled on diaryland and started writng there. I eventually began to teach myself html and built on that....so now i maintain the journal because i've discovered that i love web design and writing - I even changed my major because of it. Plus I'm a huge people person, I want to know how everyone feels about everything and why. so it's kind of evolved in an ongoing project in improving my writing, design skills and communicating with others. How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours? Oh. My. I hate seeing journals and websites with crappy design. hate it. Especially if someone is a good writer or takes their writing seriously. why would i think your writng or content is worth my viewing if you don't even think enough of it to frame it nicely? It's like someone who bought a monet or picasso...and just threw it on the floor without a frame or anything. Why would i think that painting is worth anything? you just put it on the floor like it's a couch or something. So why would i spend my time looking at it? I design templates for for people, basically anyone that asks. But often i'll contact random people after i've read their entries & saw that they are really good writers who deserve to be read and offer to do a design for them. I really think that a good design is what will get people to read the content and keep coming back. My layout has evolved. It used to really suck....and I improved on it as i developed more skills. I have a website now and I try to keep the design of my diary similar to my website. I try to keep it really plain so that the words are the main focus...i really hate diary's with all kinds of crap stuck all over them, like webrings and random graphics. I try to stay away from clutter and put some of my personality in it. You have a painful story to tell about your cousin who was shot dead. How can people console someone after such a great and tragic loss? You know, I don't think there's an easy answer to that. I wrote that entry after I got a lot of the same thing being said to me..."I'm sorry"..."you have my sincerest condolences."...."you are in my prayers." I thought, "Is this all people can say after i lost him?" I was pretty angry that people could only say a couple words about him and would never have the chance to meet him to know that he was so much more than that. Maybe everyone is different, and we all probably feel differently in the different stages in the grieving process, but I just always wanted his death to not be in vain. I wanted people to be safer about how they conducted their lives. I wanted them to appreciate everyone in their life, every second of the day. Everything else just sounded thoughtless, because it's so easy to say "i'm sorry" and not mean it, or not be affected. You talk about racial issues in your diary. Can you explain what you meant by saying: "I just knew that it was easier to be white and to be raised sans culture."? Well, i've always thought about racial issues - even in the 4th grade i was aware of race. I am multi-racial and although many people would define me as "white" by the way that i look, I also experienced a lot of prejiduce because of my background and how i do look. I later moved to Detroit - the only city in the country that has a population where white is the minority. I started school and I was the only kid who wasn't black. I had a lot of different experiences, but the thing that i walked away with was the sensitivity to what others may have to deal with. This made me a investigate race a lot in the United States. Tons of discussions and experiences later, I've come to the realization that "white" is not a culture. it's not even a color of skin. what do all white people eat? what are our traditons? are we all from the same place? there's really no easy answer to that, because it's not a culture. It's a way of thinking that we just kind of accept. Being Italian...Irish...Scandanavian - those are identities, cultures. Being white - that can include any of those people and many others, based on how they look. This serves the purpose of uniting a lot of people for a questionable purpose. What does being "white" denote? Why don't we want to discover or acknowledge our backgrounds and origins? Why is it easier to just answer "white" in a question of ethnicity? THose are a lot of questions I consider...and those are just surface questions. But, erase all the complex questions and you have me when i was younger - i just knew the kind of reactions i'd get with different answers and actions. I knew that it's much easier to be another face in the crowd, rather than have to stand out and embrace all my cultures. Often my acceptance of just being "white" would prevent ignorant remarks that hurt my feelings, and it it prevented a lot of silly little battles. So I viewed people who identified themselves as white as people who were all kind of homogenous - and remember this is my middle school thought - but i just knew that you didn't stand out if you didn't have a different culture. At that time i didn't see all the complexities of those situations and I just felt that not standing out was so much easier. You wrote a long rant about consumerism and how we are brainwashed to want things. However, in this entry, you list a number of very materialistic posessions that you want. Do you see this as contradictory? I'm a pretty contradictory person. I think all people are. I think a lot of people take up bunches of time trying to resolve those conflicts within theirselves. I'd rather come off as a paranoid schizophrenic and end up with more time. Plus i just see people - we're all so multi-faceted. I was raised around self-proclaimed activists - my mom was really into PETA and a slew of other things. In every organization or group of people that i encountered, it just seemed like people still had these wants that sometimes cobflicted with with their agendas- and that's not a bad thing, it's a human thing. I mean, I smoke. I love smoking. I also have a whooooooole lot of theories on what philip morris plans on doing to my body. so what do i do? i rant and rave and write philip morris & various politician's letters...and talk to kids about smoking (not mentioning that smoke, of course)...and then go light one up at the end of the day. I spose it's my way of being upfront about my weaknesses but also remaining active about things i feel strongly about. Did you ever knit your own organic cotton underwear and if yes, was it itchy? if I told you I'd have to kill you. I have a whole lot of people believin' that I'd suck at anything domestic. It's best kept that way. Interviewed by GingerBug
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