On the nature of diaries and time

I've just begun to read LP Hartley's The Go-Between, a book which looks more interesting than i had originally thought. It begins with an old man in his 60s uncovering some boyhood relics of his, including an old diary that he barely recognizes. It reminded me a great deal of similar instances in my life, looking through my old papers and treasure boxes and hiding places for long forgotten memories. Will I too reach the point where I'll be looking back at these objects, barely recognizing where they came from, what they meant?

Hartley's novel begins with the lines, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."I think that it is indeed hard to truly hold onto one's past self. In our memories, we remember only the very specific instances of our past which we feel shape who we are today, and everything else is rather forgotten. Looking at my old xanga, there are entries I wrote with the intention of being cryptic so that others would not know what it is I really meant, preserving its actual meaning for myself and myself only. And yet, most of them, I have no idea what the entries mean. Some detail of my life which I had deemed so important that it must be hidden is now gone forever, and I can only guess at what it meant to me. Or, even in the typical, everyday entries, I see glimmers of a self I had almost completely forgotten, one which longed for love, passion, excitement, freedom, one with thoughts so different from my own. Who is this girl, and where did she go? I feel like a reincarnated soul who carries with her only glimmers of her past identities, forced to label them so she can understand them in some perverted chronology of the story of her life.

This is why I feel like keeping a diary is important. Keeping a diary or a blog or a journal is hard: there is a lot of pressure, a lot to live up to, because you are recording your identity not only for others to read or see but rather, for your future self to see, truly your hardest critic. Sure we may all have fantasies of someone discovering our journals or diaries and proclaiming them to be literary masterpieces, the Anne Frank of our times. But ultimately what really matters is that we record some fragment of our selves, some important, fascinating piece that we can look back on and say, so thats who I was, so thats who I am. It is about rediscovery and having something worth finding again.

On the nature of beginning anew

Ahhh a fresh new start to an old old blog. Lets see how well I manage to keep this one up!

soon to come:
pictures from the cruise
pictures from life
description of life
musings on books!
aand...PICTURES OF BUGS

Writing a blog seems a bit foreign to me after all of these years, but at the very least, if anyone asks me how my life is, instead of giving them some over-regurgitated, overly simplified response, I can respond with this. ohhh the eloquence.