I snoop with cause, and, predictably, do not journal.

I used to journal constantly, and really wrote as if no one would ever read them. (As far as I know, no one has.) I don't really journal much anymore, sadly.

I truly have only snooped once, in the afore-mentioned weirdo's journal, because he was getting stalkery and I felt justified. In hindsight, I wish I'd never snooped and just followed my instincts. Which is what I do now.

Knowing what a journal can mean to someone, I'm not proud that I snooped that one time. But so be it. If I hadn't, I'd never have that story, now would I.

I may have a strange perspective on this, because, as an Acting Student, we were all required to journal, and got graded on it. I'm sure Writing students do the same.

I was never very good at it - if I write, I take that sort of personal yet artificial tone exhibited by Augusten Burroughs, David Eggers, etc. I got bad Journal grades until I moved to a pictures from magazines and art books format, which was both outside the box enough to satisfy the teachers, and to be useful to me. I'll still do the same kind of research journal today for a role, but it isn't personal.

So: many actors (a large part of my romance pool), journal. I've snooped twice - once I didn't find anything compelling, and the second time - oh my. I was secretly in love with this guy I toured with - my best friend - we even roomed together, platonically, and it was killing me.

I read his journal sure I was going to find out he was secretly in love with me, too (he had a girlfriend.) He WAS secretly in love. . .with someone else!

I certainly didn't mean to indict you , Specklet - you were clearly justified, and I'm sure many people have snooping stories, like me!

I actually have an entire journal about rainbaby and Specklet.

The one, and only, time I snooped was because I had a strong suspicion that my girlfriend was sleeping with someone else, and then I found out my girlfriend was sleeping with someone else. While it was nice to know for sure, I felt so bad for the privacy violation that I haven't done it again.

At the same time I also found a chat log on her computer involving the dude-on-the-side and she told him that she was only staying with me because I paid the rent. I don't think I've ever hated someone more than I hated her for the next few days after seeing that, and learned that sometimes it's best not to know.

I've never snooped. Never really had the opportunity to, but I know the things I think and would write in a secret journal would have less to do with what I actually felt about someone and more to do with what I was thinking about them at a specific time.

I think any snooping would just raise my paranoia levels and break my heart. And it'd probably be unjustified.

*partly remembers a film with a guy in hospital, and he was mad because the girl had written bad things about him, but later in the journal was a bunch of good stuff he'd not read. God Damn it. What film is that? Did I make it up?*

I certainly didn't mean to indict you , Specklet - you were clearly justified, and I'm sure many people have snooping stories, like me!

Oh, no worries, rainbaby-baby, I didn't feel indicted.

Further: I'm with you on this one, cmonkey: I found out some stuff about the weirdo that made me feel so used and so angry that it was just pointless. It would have been better if I hadn't known. I mean, I knew the guy was a weirdo and I should get away from him already; I didn't need to read the guy's journal to confirm it.

Ghostworld, seanyboy.

IRFH - ha.

Did anyone used to journal, but then stopped after they snooped?

I always had the expectation of snooping, so simply never could journal.

I'll admit to having snooped once during an especially bad and non-communicative stretch of a long-term relationship. It wasn't the right thing to do, and I knew it, but neither one of us was behaving particularly well at the time.

I only tell you because I felt like I needed to post something here in order to feel justified in saying that I really, really, really HATE the use of "journal" as a verb. And now that I've contributed, I can say without guilt that I really, really, really HATE the use of "journal" as a verb.

That's not directed at anyone specific, but at the wholesale plundering of the English language in general.

Plus, I'm grouchy.

Um. Yeah. I'm a bad person. I snooped at a friend's journal just because it was lying around. Pure curiosity. No other motive. I wanted to see if other people were as overwrought as me :) (this was when I was in my mid-20s). Found out a couple of interesting things about people that weren't her, secrets that she was keeping for other people, and that made me feel double-plus ungood.

Never again.

I hear ya mudpippie. I was using it as I was taught it. It sucks.

Yeah, I've snooped.

With one girlfriend, I found out about her wierd relationship with her therapist. There was an episode where someone left a note on her car, while she was at therapy, about how her boyfriend (me) was an abusive asshole. She chronicled her discussions with her therapist about whether or not she should tell me about the note--he advised not to, and she never did. Since I've never been accused of being abusive by anyone else, I've always wondered if the therapist himself left the note. It sort of fits the profile, but is so freaking odd that it's hard to believe.

Years later, a girlfriend had snooped in my stuff, and told me so, and was talking about her journals, and I warned her, explicitly, that I had a bad record, and that she shouldn't leave her journal lying around. Then she left her journal lying around. Maybe it's self-justification (probably is), but I felt like it was an invitation, you know? In the journal, she talked a LOT about being secretly in love with another guy, and about her reservations about the long-term prospects with me. I think she was sending me a message.

The last time I had an offline journal was about 15 years ago (note: this was edited to please mudpuppie).

I snooped once - my mum's. It wasn't really a journal, just a bunch of writing on a legal pad. I felt bad about it afterwards for two things: 1) It was snooping; I felt really guilty. 2) The other was what I read - she didn't like me much as a teen (the feeling was mutual).

I "journal", both online and off. The online journal has few locks on it for privacy because I learned back in 2002 that online locks can mostly be broken. And I also recently learned that people on my online locks were telling my ex that I was writing about the stupid things he'd do/say, so there goes that bit of privacy again. When will I ever learn?

Because my bf asked me not to write about our relationship in my online journal, I don't. I put all of that stuff in an offline journal that I keep in my bag. Once I accidentally left it at his place and I trust that he didn't read it. At least I don't think he did. At the time, it wasn't so bad. Now... I think I'd die if I accidentally left it there because I caught him sorta peeking over my shoulder while I was checking my email on his computer once.

I did snoop in my sister's journal once, back when we were in high school. She wasn't very good at keeping her journal safe because I think my mom snooped in there once, too. In fact, I think it was because my mom looked that I wanted to find out why my sister was in trouble, so I looked. Back then, it was pretty racy. Now? Hah! I can out-racy her any day.

I don't snoop. My oldest sister unabashedly read our postcards and letters, skimmed diaries, and snooped through our underwear drawers, dismissing it with "I'm nosey!" It seems to have produced in me an instinctive desire not to know --- I don't want to eavesdrop or cast a glance at someone's mail.

(The same sister used to painstakingly untape the wrapping paper around Christmas presents, slide the package out so she could see what it was, then seal it shut again. Not just her own presents, mind you; everyone's. Then she would tell you what you got, which spoiled the surprise. To this day, I am absurdly careful to avoid looking at or touching mysterious packages around the holidays and my birthday.)

I'm plenty nosey, but I'd rather ask questions, which a person can refrain from answering. Ironically, I'm studying archaeology, which is just glorified snooping, and of course our subjects had no opportunity to deny our nosiness.

I've been writing off and on in journals since I was about 12 - my cousin Tina got me hooked on it. She would use watercolors, calligraphic ink, mixed-media collage in hers. Every page was a total statement in mood, tone, the works.

I have never snooped in anyone else's journal, though. I don't care if anyone looks in mine - they get what they deserve. Not only that, but I'm ludicrously boring on paper.

Hipster sidenote: I bought my first-ever moleskine journal for my trip out East, and it's easily the most comfortable and warm journal I've ever had. It's now covered in stickers from bars, the radio station, and numerous theater groups I know around town. It's as comforting to me as a Linus Blanket.

I journal - occasionally. Mostly doodles and collage. Not so much wordy. It's stuff that I can look at and know exactly what I was thinking but if someone else looked at it they might think, "WTF?" or "batshitinsane."

I could write a million things about snooping and keeping a journal. But I'll keep it to five things:

1. I have consistently kept a journal for ten years. I started when I was a kid, but that was always short-lived. I really started writing as a record of the things that happened to me - more like a diary, I suppose - I was having such a great time in life that I wanted to remember how good everything was. As time went on, and as I advanced in my writing, I started to venture into more abstract subjects, prose, poetry and short stories. I've taken years of writing classes and belonged to writing groups/clubs. My journals are also a scrapbook of sorts - collections of not only writing, but pictures, drawings, and scraps of paper that mean something to me.

2. I write unabashedly, never worrying about anyone reading what I write. I suppose this is because I'm an extremely open person in almost every aspect of my life. No one would have to snoop to read what I've written. Just ask. Now, there are times that the BF would ask to read what I was writing and I'd tell him, "Not now." But that doesn't mean he couldn't pick up the same journal and read that particular entry a week down the road.

3. I am horribly picky about the journals I buy. So picky that if I see one that I fall in love with, I have to buy it, at $3 or $60. I also have to finish one journal before starting another. No questions.

4. This thread is useless without pictures. I have snooped before. And this is what I found... A black, hard-covered journal, about 8.5" x 11", lined pages. Written inside, on the very first page: Remember how much you hate this. That's all. I don't know what it means, I don't know where the book came from, or who wrote it. But I know the BF won't get rid of it. And maybe this doesn't even count as snooping because it's on a bookcase in our living room for anyone to pick up.

5. My friend snoops on her BF (aka father of her child) all the time. There have been so many times he's lied to her, and told lies to other people about her, that there is no expectation of trust left. It started when she was pregnant with her son. He started seeing someone else, meeting people online, sharing nude photos, writing personal ads on adult interest sites. Then he started telling people he was only with my friend until after the baby was born. When the baby was born, he shaped up for a bit... but then slept with another girl, telling her he was only with my friend long enough to get custody of their son when he left her. The baby is almost a year old now and his father is still a tool. There was snooping into his email, myspace page, aim account, computer histories, phone records, and various personals sites. I'm not sorry I helped her. I'm not sorry I encouraged it. I'm only sorry it didn't make her leave him a long time ago.

Whoops. That was long.

cmonkey: That she was even claiming that is hideous, but I've often found with girls that they'll brag about something in private "I only use him for the rent, hee" that they don't fully truly mean but merely say for effect.

youngergirl44, yay for long!

Elsa - are you MY sister? lol...sounds just like me as a kid. I was a lethal combination of snoopy/nosy and incredibly secretive. I wrote long tormented passages full of secrets, confessions, existential dilemmas, then carefully hid my journal with several dummy diaries scattered around the room. This way, if anyone snooped I would know which of my older brothers it was based on the (mis)information they had.

Sometime around age 11 or 12 my father and/or stepmother read my journal, which chronicled all kinds of misdoings, and sent a letter home to my mother (which I promptly opened and then resealed in a new envelope). I read, to my horror, a recounting of everything that was in my journal. Embarrassing things! Secret things! I tore up and then burned my journal on our barbeque and periodically did this with everything I wrote. I still have a hard time writing without wanting to "get rid of it." Tragically, during my initial "Fahrenheit 451" phase, I burned ALL of my journals reaching back to when I was 7 or so....sadness.

Oh, I forgot my other half, about snooping. I snooped everything ever. I made discoveries I wish I hadn't made. I learned ignorance can really sometimes be bliss. It didn't take, as I have snooped in recent years, once, really to just scan through a friend's journal and see if I came up (I know, I am a horrible person). It did come up, inevitably, with mixed result - good stuff and bad stuff. I still feel bad about this. I might feel bad about this for the rest of my life.

Elsa - are you MY sister?

Snort! I think we would've figured that out by now!

Right?

Uh-oh.

*giggling*

I never answered the journaling question. I used to journal profilically, in notebooks and sketchpads all filled with my post-adolescent angst. My online journal is shared (maintained) by my childhood best friend, so her family and mine read it regularly, and we don't do the Deep Dark Secrets stuff there.

A couple of years ago, my 70-year-old mother and I went on a two week trip through Costa Rica. I took the tiniest little hardbound sketchbook I could find: slightly larger than the palm of my hand, with a built-in pen strap. Because I could fit it in any pocket or in the strap of my hat, I took it everywhere. So I took notes everywhere, and drew landscapes and views and closeups of flowers and a detailed little thumbnail sketch of the swim-up bar with the iguanas living in the eaves...

It was wonderful! I remember more details of that trip than of any I've taken before, and it afforded so many opportunities to open conversations. It was particularly good to have when we visited a rural school; I was able to draw quick sketches for some of the kids, which made us all happy.

So, although I no longer journal, I do often carry a field notebook so I can whip off a sketch or jot down an idea. In fact, I haven't been doing it the last few months; must get back into the habit.

Sasshat's story is whimsical, funny and sad. It's like a whole Salinger novel in one paragraph.

I've never had a regular journal (I've had notebooks with poetry, scribblings, ideas, etc.) and I haven't snooped anyone, and mostly don't think I would. Like, if you use the bathroom at someone's house, you know how you look in the medicine cabinet? I generally don't. Not because of some big ethical stand; I'm just not that interested/curious. For one reason or another, I've had a lot of people's passwords for their email accounts, or web sites, and I've never snooped. For ethical reasons, but also - still not that interested.

Between my husband and I, everything is an open book. I don't care if he reads my email or chat logs or anything - though, like me, I just don't think he would be that interested. Of course, if either of us had reason to doubt the other, maybe we would... who knows. If I had a child, I don't think I would ever go rummaging to read their stuff except perhaps in the most desperate of circumstances. However, if they left it lying around more than once or twice, I probably would, reasoning that it was meant to be read in an effort to communicate something that he/she couldn't talk about but wanted me to know. I guess.

Like, if you use the bathroom at someone's house, you know how you look in the medicine cabinet?

um. no. seriously I'm horrified at the thought that there are people who do this. How incredibly rude and disgusting.

Heh. Maybe people don't do this... I've seen it in films, and read it in books, so I thought it was fairly common.

People do it.

Oh dear.
I lied to you. I remembered that I have snooped.

Years ago, in my early 20s, my best friend of the time started dating my girlfriend. It was really tough. She dropped me and started seeing him. I snooped in his diary. Me and her had never consummated the relationship and I'd assumed that was because she was waiting for the relationship to be of a certain length or for marriage or something. Anyway a couple of weeks after the "betrayal" I happened on his diary. It was full of all the lovey dovey stuff, but also a bunch of stuff from before when J--- & I had split up and details of all the sex they were having.

That made me feel pretty shitty.

I kept a diary through middle school, high school, and the first year of college. I sometimes go back and read it, just to humble myself. It is full of those horrendous dramatics that are typical for a teenage girl. I know my brother, and probably my mom, snooped in it from time to time, and I probably would have cared then, but not now.

I snooped in my mom's journal just once, and read something about sex with dad. Eww.

The most journaling I've done was in an online chatty sort of place that's been going on for 9 years or so, though the archives of the first few years have been lost. It was where I wrote of my increasing marital unhappiness, and of how I had fallen in love with someone else. Back in those early internet days, I never dreamed that my then-wife would find the site, so I was pretty open. She did find it. We got divorced (which was a good thing). I go back and read the existing 8-year archives every now and then, and am amazed at how I've changed.

i have journaled...i have snooped. what i learned from journaling was far more rewarding then what i learned from snooping...although so many friends of mine have discovered such life-shattering things they probably would have not otherwise discover:(these are not my discoveries, so i feel free to share them with all of you!!)

discovery:
husband sleeping with his best friend's wife!! OUCH...trashay...scandalous...

discovery:
wife had affair with her business parner..another woman. OUCH...skankay!

discovery:
daughter has had sex (child at the time was 13) SCARY!!

i have never learned anything by snooping that i already didn't know.

my estranged at the time soon-to-be ex-husband snooped in my journal once. he didn't like what he found. accused me of all kinds of things. bottom line: i don't have to tell you ANYTHING...never allowed to have a life/personality outside of the marriage. god forbid i have feelings that don't concern you since we are GETTING DIVORCED...
oy.

my journals now aren't about my current life events like they used to be...i don't use it to chronicle my daily adventures. i record abstract thoughts and feelings...if my partner snooped i think she'd read the stuff i ramble about in the dark late at night, so, no worries :)

I used to have a fake journal as a kid (7-ish?) which was made to be snooped. A typical entry would be : School is fun, I really love my Mom and Brother and hope to become a teacher someday... I was very dedicated to writing in it regularly and imbuing this prop with as much reality as possible, and I always left it out for anyone to find. My "real" journaling was done in drawings (still is) with characters representing everyone and everything in my life/head all more or less safely coded and only clear to me. I was very wary of my family (still am) as we are not so much "snoopy" as wrecklessly curious. I still wonder what people are doing in their houses and peer a bit into windows and try to draw character judgements out of shopping cart contents and I always ask people how they lost their teeth.

Oh and I should add that I am much better at NOT looking into your medicine cabinets now, before it was just too enticing! So many people have enemas in there, it's odd. My medicine cabinet is full of fake blood capsules, ulcer medicine, sunscreen and condoms and feel free to snoop in there.

oh and as to gift impatience once I peeled away all the corrugation of a cardboard gift box and shined a high wattage bulb behind it so I could kinda see through the papery skin. (it was books and cds tho...so the mystery remained) I didn't technically "open" it before christmas and i really don't feel guilty about it, i hate waiting!

When I read the question, since the words were capitalized, I thought it referred to two new trendy social networking sites that I hadn't heard of yet (especially since Journl was misspelled).

I began keeping a diary when I was 11 years old. I kept it pretty much consistantly right through much of my first marriage. I started journals with the discoveries of my pregnancies, written for my boys - how I felt, when they first moved, my feelings for them, name ideas, their births, right up to their first birthdays and a bit after. I had a dream diary for a couple of years (that I should start again). I have a mom's journal for the funny things they'd say (now they're too big to really say anything as innocently funny). And for a while I had one during my new marriage. I just seem to never find time anymore. I've been using a day planner to occasionally write down things (like today, I saw a Bald Eagle!). I started an on-line diary, but then found this place and spend most of my on-line time here. I still have all of my old diaries, and I really don't think anyone's snooped through them, but I don't know what to do with them. Those during my teen and early 20s' are too x-rated and detailed for me to want any of my descendants to ever read. I've thought of going back and editing them, but I'm afraid I'll edit too much and lose the girl I was back then.
As for snooping, I never did as a child. I never wanted to find the Christmas gifts before the day; I always liked the surprise. I did once stay at a bed-and-breakfast with my then best friend. The inn had journals for visitors to jot their feelings down in. I discovered an entry from the guy I was dating at the time - he'd been there previously with his now ex-wife. That was weird.