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Today's Interview: clcassius -

Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers.

A short bio, eh? That's difficult since my writing tends towards the lengthy and self-indulgent, but we'll try it your way. ;-) My name is Carrie and I'm a 23-year-old from Maryland. I grew up in a ridiculously idealistic town that had good schools, entirely too many golf courses and pretensions of utopian living.

I had a very stable childhood in a caring home, so naturally I'm clinically depressed, in therapy and on several medications. I've long been a lover of books and writing and words--and have a preposterously large vocabulary to show for it! I have a degree in journalism and spent a year in graduate school pursuing a master's in journalism before the light bulb finally went on and I realized I didn't want to be a journalist. My resume calls me a "writer and editor" and that's about right. I'm also a photographer (that crashing blimp on my page would be a Carrie original), a swimmer, an armchair philosopher, an informed but unmotivated aficionado of the wackiness that is American and world politics, a traveler, an eternal pessimist, a generally witty person, the one who is a girl and a friend but never a girlfriend, a wannabe intellectual, a wannabe expatriate, and an unapologetic nerd.

My current quest is to find my calling and my purpose in life, but I'm often sidetracked by bouts of existential angst and the need to watch a great deal of late-night television.

Why did you choose this username?

Ah, here begins one of these "back in the day" reminiscences. Back in the day of something like AOL 3.0, my friend Anna introduced me to the wonders of online chat rooms. Before that I had haunted the bulletin boards of Prodigy (oh lord, I'm really dating myself, aren't I?) for my computer-based kicks, so I didn't have a handle, only a set of numbers and letters. Anyway, Anna was kind enough to set up an AOL screen name for me so I could sign on and chat on her computer when I came over to her house. At that time I was known as MHCassius. The "MH" stood for "Marshall Herrick," the role I played in a production of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in tenth grade. (Yes, I played a male role because I was tall for a girl and had a fairly deep voice, plus men were often scarce when it came to high school drama troupes. Never mind my waist length hair at the time. That's what enormous, silly period hats are for.)

Anyway. The "Cassius" was a nod to my absolute favorite Shakespeare character of all time, Cassius from "Julius Caesar." I thought he was a hell of a lot more interesting and complex than everyone else's favorite character Brutus. He was much more emotional and passionate and it was he who came up the brilliant idea to off Caesar in the first place, only Brutus seems to get all the credit. Everyone seemed to go on about how noble and great Brutus was and what an ambitious asshole Cassius was. I thought his story sounded a lot like my own: I was very passionate and had very strong ideas, but no one ever seemed to pay attention to anything I had to say. Worse yet, if they did, they often got credit for having the idea in the first place. There were too many high school equivalents of Brutus hanging around that everyone seemed to like better. So Cassius became a hero of mine. Later, when I finally convinced my parents to get AOL for our computer, I kept the Cassius and replaced the MH with my own initials--CL--and it's been my online handle ever since.

Why do you keep a diary online?

Heh, I think it has something to do with what I said in the previous question about people not paying attention to me. I guess being a writer I've always thought I had something to say to people or some story to tell and having a diary online for everyone to see is a good way of getting my voice out there. I'd rather do that than conceal my ideas in paper journals. I'm notoriously bad at keeping up my writing in a paper journal and having an audience reminds me that I need to keep writing--even if it's only so my friends know what's going on with me.

The good thing about writing in this forum is that I don't feel like I'm forcing myself and my ideas upon people; whereas when I looked at journalism I saw those writers (myself included) as having tremendous power to force their viewpoint onto people simply because the news is often considered the end-all, be-all of information. People tend to believe the news implicitly, but I think it's much better for all ideas to be presented and for people to make decisions based on the different viewpoints they hear or read.

People reading my stuff don't have to believe it simply because my byline and a newspaper's name is on it. They can make their own decisions about what I write here. They can question it and comment on it and see if and how it relates to their lives in any way. And if they hate it, escape is only a mouse-click away. But the comments I get from people who read it and like it are great, especially as regards my writing about my depression. So many people are suffering from depression and if my writing can somehow articulate what they're feeling and let them know that they are most certainly not alone, then I am more than happy to keep writing about it. It's therapy for me, but knowing that other people find it therapeutic as well is very encouraging.

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

I think a layout is important for a web-based diary only in the context that it is a reflection of yourself as well as your feelings and your writing. Yes, the writing is the most important part of it. There are many times that I have happened upon a diary that was beautifully designed but the writing was so bad that I couldn't go on reading it. I'm a bit of a Grammar Nazi, so I prefer accurate spelling and subject-verb agreement to a gorgeous design. :) That said, I also would not continue reading a diary that is well written but is poorly or confusingly designed.

I think the key is simplicity and user-friendliness. You want people to read what you have to say, not wait for a ton of unnecessary graphics to load or dig through a hundred menus or links stacked a mile high.

As for mine, I like its simplicity and easy navigation. Anna designed it for me and although I haven't changed it in quite some time, I am still quite fond of it. Part of it is vanity--thatis my picture of the crashing blimp after all--and part of it is that it just works. It's a forgiving layout for my lengthy entries and the red, white and blue motif goes well with the "Geo-political Machinations" theme. For the curious, the geo-political theme originally came from the fact that my diary was intended to be a journal of my seminar at the Republican National Convention in 2000 as well as about my life in general.

I've always been accused by my mother of thinking the world revolved around me, so the geo-political theme is a sort of tongue-in-cheek reference to that: I think my life and my personal problems are so big and terrible that they must shake the very foundations of international politics. ;-) And the blimp, well, I think it sums things up quite nicely. As I said once in an entry, the blimp is "A Hindenburg-esque visual metaphor that while it's all going down in flames around us, dammit, it's still patriotic."

When your brother Andy saved a boy's life at the swimming pool, your entry radiated how proud you must have been of him. I'm sure though, as with most siblings, you must have had your ups and downs during childhood. When did you start to understand him as a person? Did you ever imagine that there'd be a time you'd be so proud?

I daresay my siblings and I are still not very far removed from childhood, since we continue to experience those ups and downs despite me being 23, my sister being 21 and my brother being 18. As kids we fought constantly but we had our share of fun and frolic and the same is true today. It's still dangerous to leave us alone together in a room, since the outcome will either be mass destruction of said room and/or mass destruction of some or all of the siblings present.

As for starting to understand my brother, I confess that in many ways I still do not understand him, mostly because none of us are as close as you might imagine from the relative closeness of our age. The three of us are such tremendously different people that it's difficult to find common ground-hence all the fighting. But I think I started to "get" my brother when he became a lifeguard. My sister and I were both lifeguards, so it was sort of like welcoming him into a family tradition. We became one of those lifeguard dynasties within our city's aquatics department-everybody seemed to know or have worked with one or two or all of us.

Since we finally had some common ground (especially when it came to bitching about our atrocious pay scale), I think we could finally appreciate each other and indeed be proud of one another. When my brother made his save at his pool it was as though I could finally see how much he had grown up and become an adult. Since Andy had always been the punk kid brother always getting into trouble, I didn't think I would ever be proud of him, much less think of him as an adult. But now here he is off at university and doing exceptionally well and I'm even more proud of him than I was before. I suppose even annoying little brothers can surprise you.

One thing I notice about your diary is that you have fewer than 200 entries spanning over 2 years. Your entries were more frequent early on in its existence, but now they are sparser. Why is that? How have you used your diary? Is it an outlet to you or do you use it as a way of letting your friends know what's going on in your life?

I update infrequently partly in response to outside stimuli (i.e. all the crap I had to get done during my senior year of college, the limited Internet time I had while studying abroad in London, the heavy workload of graduate school, etc.) and partly because when I write it becomes a bit of an ordeal. Because my diary is a form of therapy for me, I feel like I can't write it unless I'm in touch with my feelings at the time and have something to say about the situation. My entries are lengthy too, mostly because I store everything up from a day or a week or a month of my life and then let it come gushing out in a flood of words. When I sit down to write the motivation is not really that I think my friends need to know what's going on in my life but because there's a ton of something on my mind and I better get it out before I explode.

It usually takes me several hours to write an entry and throughout I can be laughing or sobbing uncontrollably. It's intense and draining, so it's not something I like to do every day. When I started writing my diary I was going through a particularly bad period of depression so I was feeling that intensely every day or every few days. I'd like to think I've evened out a wee bit in terms of my emotions--so that means less intensity with a longer period of buildup. Thus I don't feel the pressing need to purge myself through writing as often. Plus, I'm very anal about the craft of writing, so I take a lot of time to make sure I'm saying what I need to say in the way I really want to say it and that I'm spelling things correctly and whatnot.

A while back you spent some time in England. Being a born and bred Brit, I am interested in hearing about people who aren't native to the country and their experiences in England. Where was your favourite place in England? How similar or different was it to America? Would you come back? If you've been to New York or Washington, how similar are they to London? What were your overall opinions of us Brits?

Truth be told, my absolute favorite place I visited in Great Britain was the Scottish highlands. Seeing a rainbow over Glencoe is the type of beauty in nature that makes you weep. As for England proper, I loved going up to the north. The country around Newcastle is very pretty and I spent a day hiking along Hadrian's Wall while I was there. I went by myself too and there was something really pleasant about the solitude in the midst of these rolling hills and low, grey clouds.

I also loved London, although I wish my living situation there had been a bit better. Eight noisy, opinionated girls in a small, messy flat for four months do little for one's mental health. I'm fond of places that have a palpable sense of history to them, as London does. The fact that I could go somewhere like the Tower of London and be in a place that was nearly three times as old as my country was very cool.

I like the harmony between old and new that exists in London--how you can have a Blockbuster Video or something on the same street as a 300-year-old church. I liked also how history is sort of tucked away throughout the city like little surprises waiting to be discovered--how I could pass one of those ubiquitous blue plaques marking the home of a poet or author or famous statesman on my way to class every morning. This is so different from America where our history does not necessarily coexist well with the present. Even a place like historic Williamsburg in Virginia is essentially an amusement park and historical cities like Philadelphia are known more for their sports teams, good shopping and good hotel rates than for the Liberty Bell or the Continental Congress.

I think London did have a few aspects of New York and Washington D.C. For example, London has a very cosmopolitan air to it--what with all its theatre and art and music--that New York has as well. It also has that feeling of constant movement and sleeplessness that New York has, as well as the multi-ethnic aspect. They are both very vibrant and diverse cities although, truth be told, I prefer London, probably because it doesn't feel as cramped as New York. It feels much more spread out and yet easier to navigate. London isn't much like Washington D.C. in that London feels like a place where people live, not just where they work. D.C. is very much a commuter city and it becomes a bit of a ghost town after 7 p.m. Yes, D.C. and London both have that feel of being the beating heart of their respective nations, but London offers so much more than if it were simply a capital city. D.C. has its share of culture and nightlife but it's nowhere near what you will find in London. I actually find D.C. to be rather boring, although that may also come from me living a half-hour from it for most of my life. Familiarity breeds contempt and all that. :)

As for the Brits in general, I like them a great deal. I've always been an Anglophile, so studying and living in London and encountering them on their home field was a dream come true. I discovered that some of the stereotypes were true-like the politeness and that ever-so-British stiff upper lip we hear so much about over here. I was surprised to find how funny the Brits are as a whole--since the stereotype I always heard on this side of the pond is that I wouldn't be likely to find any Monty Python-esque humor there, just bone-dry wit. I like how the British seemed to be so much more articulate than Americans and they use the language in a much better way than we do (which I would only expect--it is the mother tongue after all!). Americans seem to be caught in this "like, you know" sort of linguistic rut, so it was fun to interact with people who are much more creative with the English language. And your swears and curses are infinitely better than ours. or maybe they just sound more convincing coming from someone with a British accent. :)

Finally, your silly question. If you were told you could only say one sentence for the whole of tomorrow, what would it be and why?

Just one? Hmm, it would probably have to be something blasphemous, simply because I tend to respond to most stimuli with a "Goddamn!" or a "Sweet mother of mercy!" or a "Lord Almighty!" or an "Oh for Christ's sake!" Perhaps it's not very polite or ladylike, not to mention it isn't exactly giving me box seats in heaven anytime soon, but it's what I do. :) But I think if I could only say one sentence all day it would have to be something very cryptic spoken in a low, ominous voice so I could freak everyone out. Something like: "My consuming melancholy knows no end." Eh, that's not fun or cryptic enough. A movie quote, perhaps? Something like: "Roads? Where we're going we don't need roads." Nah. It couldn't be a 1980s film reference, that's just embarrassing. I know! It's a sentence from "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil, one of my all-time favorite books:

"Philosophers are despots who have no armies to command, so they subject the world to their tyranny by locking it up in a system of thought." Follow that with a meaningful but slightly maniacal stare and a slow nod and everyone will be asking: "The hell?" But it'll make them think and it'll spook them, so I think my work here is done. :)

Interviewed by Nicola

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3:40 p.m.
2003-03-15

clcassius

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