dramatis personae.

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26 november 1997

10:36 p.m.

Dear diary, I'm feeling extraordinarily thankful tonight. I thank Kymm, for her unmatched efforts in making Open Pages the greatest of online `ohana. I thank Diane, Maggy, and yes, Stacey, for their inspiration. I thank Jay, for showing the lightest of sides to the darkest of corners; Michael, for having the strength to bare the furthest reaches of emotion; Greg, for telling me to put up or shut up. I am humbly grateful to Jarret to showing me a human soul can be sent as binary data. To Aaron, Alan, Boyd, Charles, Clay, Dan, Ed, Jason, Jim, Kevin, Lance, Robert, Seth and Stephen for being better friends to me than I was to them. Thanks to Nate, Jen, Walt, Gen, Ryan and Del, for egging me on from the very beginning. I thank those many many other unnamed friends who know the real me, for their encouragement and critiques, for letting me borrow snippets of their lives when my own fell flat, and for being strong enough to point out my many moments of denial, hypocrisy and immodesty. I thank the dozens of curious, caring spirits who've followed me through my days, for somehow finding something of worth even when I found I was shying from the plain, unflinching truth -- the kind of thing that first drew me to this art -- as the lines between my organic and electonic self dissolved. I thank them in advance for their understanding, for remembering me as the first to string a thread through a globe-spanning, dizzyingly diverse lei of lives... and not the cowardly pretender my online persona had become. I thank the literally hundreds of other everyday people who share the minutae of their lives to anyone who cares to explore them, for the simple bravery and honesty even I, after only eighteen months, ultimately could not sustain. I am thankful this evening most of all to Derek, for finally showing me contentedness and love are not mutually exclusive... and that it's not the combination for me. Mahalo nui loa ia `oukou i ko `oukou ho`olohe `ana ia`u.