In the summer of 1996, I spent pretty much every day online thanks to the computers at the public library. One day I woke up and had this line from an old folksong stuck in my head that simply refused to go away. Over and over and over the line would abuse me, driving me nuts. Eventually I got so fed up I decided to find the whole lyrics to at least make it an actual song, and not just a loose line.

I did a web-search for "three ribbons", and looked through the matches. I didn't find the lyrics, but I did find a poem that included the word "ribbon", decided to read it and liked it so much I looked at the rest of the site by this woman named Cara. And that is how I found her journal.

You would not believe how fast I got addicted to reading her daily accounts. I had never even thought of somebody putting a journal online, and the mix of getting freshly updated accounts from a stranger's life as well as her thoughts and ideas really appealed to me.

I soon found myself stumbling over links to more and more journals, but few of them really stuck to me, and come winter, Cara had decided to end her journal. And so my journal reading days seemed over.