Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers.

I was born in Evanston, IL, on 3/28/1984, in the same hospital that my dad was born. In fitting with the apparent family tradition of never leaving Evanston, I spent my entire life up to about two months ago there. Now I�m attending college in Boulder, CO, relieved to be away, majoring in music (composition/education). Mountains still look completely alien to me, but I like to climb them. I�m stuck in a rut of writing piano suites, nothing but piano suites, for some unknown reason. There was a rush of diagnoses made on me at some point in high school, all uncertain, all pretty vague; panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia, depression, blah blah blah, and as a result I�ve been on Paxil since the end of my freshman year in high school, with the exception of senior year and the last two weeks. I despise Paxil, which becomes readily apparent the more I talk about it, so I�ll leave it at that. I like to draw, but only with pastels because I can�t control the colours that come out. I have a very dry humour that hardly anyone appreciates, and that includes me most of the time... it gets so obscure that I forget what I�m talking about, much like right now; this isn�t really a bio, as I just noticed. Just snippets with no continuity. I don�t think I have a life story that fits well if you try and tell it chronologically.

Why did you choose this username?

The easy answer to that is just that I was in a band called the Umlautic Camels, now defunct, in which I sang and played bass; hence: singing camel. I believe the diary might have predated the band though, so.... I�m not sure. But the whole camel part stems from quite a while before that. My family and I were driving the winding roads of the canyons of southern California, and for some reason there�s quite a few camel farms up there. One must have gotten loose from his pen, or cage, or whatever they keep camels in to keep them from wandering over the edges of the cliffs, because that is exactly what this camel did. It was meandering around at the top of a plunging precipice, eating grass and spitting and being smelly and doing normal camel things, when suddenly it lost its footing and tumbled over the edge, landing with a horrific thud in the centre of the road. My dad had to brake hard and swerve, nearly killing us all as well, to miss the massive bleeding dead camel which had suddenly, it seemed atthe time, fallen randomly out of the sky as an angry sign from God or something. Being probably about eleven, I thought this was the funniest thing I had ever seen ever in my entire life and commenced laughing for.. like... days. And since then I have incorporated camels into everyday conversation, though it has waned by now (thank god). I�m sure that even a year and a half ago, when I started this diary, I thought I had the funniest username on the planet. Silly me.

Why do you keep a diary online?

I�m an incurable exhibitionist. Maybe. I�ve kept paper journals before, but they never went anywhere. They were just intolerable accounts of which boy in my grade was hot and why, and bad poetry which I thought made me dark and cool, when in fact it made me wallow in myself. I�ve always reveled in interpersonal transfer, needed it, so a paper journal always seemed incomplete. I thought maybe scaring myself into believing other people may be judging me would force me to be a better writer, which I desperately wanted..... an account of my own life; written as it was lived: spinning and confusing and unbearable and beautiful. This eventually turned into an online diary, because of the much simpler (and maybe truer) answer: I cannot decipher my own handwriting to save my soul.

How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours?

I try not to be a layout-whore, because when you think about it; what are books printed on? Plain white paper, bound in a simple cardboard cover. Just because �Naked Lunch� has that god-awful bright yellow sharp blinding cover, much like that yellow Diaryland template, for example, won�t stop people from delving into it, loving it or hating it or whatever. You don�t see people at book clubs grumping about how the color white is so boring. But there is a difference, I suppose. Trying to pick the actual entry out of an explosion of colors and pictures and confusing frames is simply not worth it. I�m going to stick with this point: less is more. I�ve seen some beautiful layouts that I would gladly put on my wall, but never consider writing on; it wouldn�t even cross my mind. You see a van Gogh painting; you think �ooooh�. You don�t think �writing paper�.. I mean.. do you? As for my own layout, I hardly even remember where it came from. Celerysticks, I think, which I believe is now defunct. It�s linked on my page, but the link is dead. I had it up for awhile in 2001, took it down in favour of a bunch of dark and hard-to-read layouts, and eventually came back to it because I got yelled at by so many people that my diary was hard to read that they had to copy and paste the entry into Microsoft Word. It�s just a plain sheet of white paper; frame, entry, frame. It�s that simple.

What has made you want to stay at this diary for so long? Have you ever wanted to quit writing at Diaryland?

I don�t know if a year and a half is that long, though sometimes it really seems that way. I have definitely wanted to stop. Sometimes I not only want to stop, but I want to go into the members area and delete all the entries, and then print them, and then burn them in the fireplace, using the resulting flames to toast marshmallows. Usually, though, at least in retrospect, I�m glad that I do it. My memory is so terrible that I can�t remember much of my life, and without this diary, I wouldn�t remember much of the last two years. Often I�ll just go to my own page and surf around (there used to be a �random� link up that you could click on and it�d go to a random entry, but it died. poor link.) and just read through for hours and hours. Sometimes my own writing seems unfamiliar to me, and that�s scary. Sometimes I don�t remember things that have happened that I�ve written about, and I wonder if I�ve made them up, and maybe I have, and sometimes that�s scary too. But I will always have these (sometimes inaccurate, exaggerated, convoluted, melodramatic, poorly written, dreamlike) memoirs. It�s completely worth it. Another thing that makes my journal completely worth it is when people write me or leave notes in my guestbook.. or leave at least some indication that they�ve been there. To know that this exhibionist ideal is not all just an illusion is priceless. All I�ve ever wanted, really, is for people to know me and for me to know people. I guess I�m halfway there.

You talk about what you have done over the years of your life. If you could relive any of those years, which would you choose? Which one would you not want to relive?

By relive, do you mean relive exactly as it was or have the chance to do it over again? If you mean the former, I would avoid my freshman year of high school at all costs. I think I go back to that a lot; if I hadn�t done such and such my freshman year... if I hadn�t been so weak freshman year, etc. Something got warped that year, and I don�t know if it was the beginning of my mind�s decline or the moment of the turnaround for its incline. I don�t know what went wrong and I wouldn�t want to go back and see it all go wrong again. On the other hand, if I could relive it and make changes, I�d go back with no hesitation, knowing that I am not allowed to hide in my room and avoid friends and school and life and complain all the time and write bad poetry about dead birds. For pure enjoyment purposes, though, I�d relive something I can�t remember now. Not my first year, but maybe my second. It must be indescribable to suddenly be able to communicate after a year of silence. There are other people and you can suddenly talk to them.... and they can talk to you. I can�t even imagine.

In a unique conversation with your grandmother, what did you come away with? Why does this moment stick out in your mind?

I would get in so much trouble for posting private family business on the internet, but the great thing about old people is that they�re scared of the internet. Anyway, my grandparents, all four of them, have always given me a unique view on being old because of their four radically different plans of action. My grandfather on my dad�s side (the husband of the one in the above link) committed suicide in 1992 by starvation. Both my grandparents on my mom�s side are determined to live until they are at least 110 and they prove it every second of their crazy lives. However, the grandma I was talking about has this idea that there�s an limit to how old you can be and still be healthy and happy. She is positive she has passed this age, though if you ask her she has no idea when this age IS, and is constantly making up diseases for herself to come down with. She got herself hearing aids although her hearing is flawless, and holds my arm to walk around although she�s way less likely to fall down than, say, me, or my dad, or anyone else around that�s at least 30 years younger than she is. The reason that this particular conversation was so important to me was because she never talks about her past. It�s impossible sometimes for me to see her as anything other than an apple-cheeked white-haired Southern-accented little old lady who lives by herself in an assisted living complex (though, of course, she doesn�t need it) because she never gave me any context in which to imagine anything else. That night, she did. And I was able to see where she gets the sayings she does, why she won�t eat certain things, say certain things, why she doesn�t seem as surprised as everyone else about war. She�s lived through two. Her brother was killed in a plane. I am shocked sometimes that all of this isn�t written on her face, and for that matter, every ancient face we see on the street and in nursing homes and at restaurants. It�s so odd that it isn�t visible. If I had lived through what she lived through I would want it to be visible. How do we expect to understand their language when we have no context in which to do it? My grandmother�s conversation was an open window for a split second.... it�s not long enough. But I�m grateful to her for it.

If you were to be stranded with ONE person from your cast list on a deserted island, who would you choose and why?

Erik, definitely Erik. I would get sick of seeing anyone�s face on a desert island for the rest of my days, but only Erik and Camille would probably honor that and stay out of my way before I brained them with a coconut. Practically, though, I know him the best, and he knows me the best. We wouldn�t have to waste time figuring out how not to piss each other off, because we already know this from trial and very much error freshman year (that year keeps popping up its ugly head....). He can swim well enough to catch food, whereas I�m terrified of water. This is all logistics, but really it was just an off-the-cuff answer. Now that I think about it, this is impossible to answer. I�d bring Nick or Aaron so we could spend the rest of our days playing idyllic island music, but both of their attitudes would explode my head in a matter of days. I�d bring Camille so we could invent a new society and then immediately fuck it up, but we�d eventually feed off each other�s depression so much that we�d have to separate for fear of dual suicide. I�d bring Mike or Andrew for endless amusement, but you know how long that would last (not). Yeah, I think Erik is still my final answer.

Interviewed by Brandi

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