Archives Past ReEntry sites. Apply What grabs you? Schedule Upcoming ReEntry Editors This week's ReEntry editor is a feminist, an artist, a bit of an intellectual, and an activist. But she's not scary. Meet... April

I started keeping a journal (mostly a series of rants about the world around me) on my own domain more than a year ago. But, thanks to an obsessed friend, I discovered the convenience and community of diaryland.com and settled in.

It's continued for a little less than a year since. While I read diaries elsewhere, most of my favorites are the first people I learned through their diaryland diaries. I like the sense that we're all on the same block.

"I think I'll run away with myself some day soon (barring any proposals, that's fantasy). I'll run myself right out of my mind. I'll enter an imaginary infinite winter. I'll push back the cold with the heat of my body and I will be a very very angry person."

This was so long ago, when spring was just starting and summer was a distant memory. Susan's reaction against spring was so characteristically her. A chance to see through her eyes.

We reacted so differently to the new season coming. She yearned to cling to winter, stretch it out. And I'm always waiting for what's next. We've had a thousand electronic half-arguments over just such differences.

Now she's a bright and happy New Yorker, whose tenderness for the city shows in her writing and perspective-shifting photographs. You must read.

"I don't know this country. I want to be in Tennessee. I want to see Graceland. I want to see how green Atlanta is and I want to hear the way people speak in Mississippi."

If I could pick any far-distant journaler to take on a roadtrip, it would be Allison. She has such a history of stories to tell (dig a little and you'll find a past with losses and addiction and so much life). And she has this heart that just loves everything.

Even when she's restless and bored - as in this entry - or worried and trivial, it's still apparent. The way she loves and wants everything has made me weep, grin, laugh aloud.

"and it isn't that fairly impromptu picnics that end up in rainstorms with friends aren't pleasant, and it isn't that the wet green of everything isn't brilliant enough as is/was, because they are."

Sweet, pensive, funny as hell. Most of my favorites are people I feel some sort of relationship with, feel like we're talking, but Ryan is different. He's a novel I'm waiting to unravel. Even his attempts to not talk about his heartbreak are strangely literary.

This boy who talks about 'his own Fanny Price' is also a perfectly ordinary twenty-something-guy-type. And I can relate to that; everyone has known boys like this - who are bright and amazing and yet manage to be perfectly ordinary.

"Black is infallible. No angsting over matching colours - anything goes. Utterly reliable. And you know what? I'm sick of it."

Esperanca has this amazing quality. Everthing she does comes out darling, exquisite. It charms me. But the best, the very best thing, about her is her precision.

She weaves memory and emotion into her commentary on what she ate or wore today. And gives such moment to these tiny things. We're so far apart in distance and (I think) experience, but we are just alike when it comes to details. Yes, black is a workhorse of color, classic - but not tireless. I understand exactly, and she puts it better than anyone else could.

"Today on the metro I was looking at my hands. At some point they changed. I mean, naturally they have been changing constantly over the years. The basic shape is still the same, but they are bigger, or different. I can't remember what my child-hands looked like. Why can't I remember that?"

I remember what her child-hands looked like, but I don't know what they're like now. Ms. Snide is, I confess, one of my oldest friends. One of my longest-known friends, that is.

But it is through her diary, through the diary community in general, that I've come to know her as an adult. She's just as thoughtful as I remember. I would find her writing fascinating even if I didn't know her at all, but I am particularly glad of this medium for giving me a sense of someone I once knew.