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| Abolitionist, President, Diarist |
If you're anything like me, and unless you're a nonhuman you are, your memory of your childhood gets fuzzier and fuzzier the older you get. There are people for whom this isn't a problem. Let's call them journalers or diary keepers or people who thinks it's not talking to yourself like a crazy person if you're writing it down instead of saying it aloud. I have never been one of these people; therefore, I can no longer say with any certainty how old I was when I received my first diary. I
think some member of my family who thought they understood all little girls may have gotten me a pink one with a lock and key and flowery lined pages when I was somewhere between the ages of 2 and 17. I don't recall ever writing in it, preferring to instead spend my spare time playing Truth or Dare with the older kids on my street. I once dared a preteen guy named Brandon to pee in front of me, which he had no problem doing because back then I was thought to be, at best, completely sexless or, at worst, such a die hard tom boy that I may have, in fact, willed myself to grow my own boy junk. Anyway, Brandon held up his end of the bargain, but I was too shy to actually watch. This is why, when I'm dead and Jen or whoever is in charge of going through the personal effects of those who die all alone in this world is going through my things, they won't find a girly diary with a, "June 15, 1989--Today I saw a penis. Meh." entry.
The first time I concretely remember getting a diary was at the end of the summer break between my 6th and 7th grade years. There was a gap of a few weeks between the time my elementary school started its fall term and when my new junior high went back in session. For those few weeks, I volunteered in the multi-handicapped classroom at what had been my elementary school. I volunteered with a teacher named Christa Sprinkel. I don't recall that we got to know each other terribly well, but that's perfectly logical given that my teenage angst bloomed early, and I wasn't very pleasant to be around. At the end of the last day of my six weeks of service, Mrs. Sprinkel presented me with a thank you gift. "Every young lady should have a place to record her thoughts," she told me as I opened the journal. The cover was designed to look like a cross section of a pink geode. The pages were gold leafed. The attached bookmark was pink satin. That bookmark is still safely nestled between pages 3 and 4. Out of the sense of guilt and obligation that I felt as a gift recipient, I gave writing in the journal a try. I've been an insomniac since birth, so one night (truly, it could have been any night) when my thoughts wouldn't turn themselves off, I sat up in bed, grabbed my new journal, and tried to write exactly what popped into my brain as it popped. This was a colossal failure. Eventually I started to feel silly, so I ripped the page out and threw it away. I realize at this point in my story that it's starting to sound as if there was something inside of me, something too horrible to let out, even in my own private journal. Perhaps I was coming to terms with the fact that I'd had a huge crush on Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer when I was in the 4th grade and how that coupled with the fact that I had, in fact, snuck a peek at Brandon's peeing penis (or did I?) had led me to realize that I was as gay as the day is long (that's 24 hours gay even during Daylight Saving Time) and I just couldn't bear to admit it to myself. No, I think the destroyed journal entry went something like, "Oh my god, why can't I sleep? Why can I never sleep? I want to kill myself I'm so tired of being tired." So you can see that it really was a wasted page that deserved to be torn out and tossed aside. That was all the journaling I had in me for another sixteen years or so.
One Christmas a few years ago, my best friends got me a journal. By this time I'd started writing semi regularly, so the blank page had become a whole different kind of terrifying to me than it was during those sleepless junior high school nights. This journal's a good one. It's brown with a black and orange plaid pattern and an orange elastic band to keep it closed. It's the perfect size. It feels good to hold. My friends even took some of the scary out of the journal for me by inscribing it with a very nice yet undeserved note about my writing ability. In fact, maybe this wasn't a journal after all. Maybe it was just something for me to have on hand--something more convenient than the back of an ATM receipt. It seems like the sort of thing a serious writer would carry around for when random musings try to burrow out of her skull, so I did. I carried this journal around in that other ultra important accessory of the super serious--the messenger bag. It was always with me. Thanks to my new it's-not-a-journal-journal attitude, I was occasionally able to scribble some words down in this bound stack of cocktail napkins. Since I now carried it with me everywhere, I found it was particularly useful in potentially awkward social situations. For the first week or so that I worked at the bank, I would sit in the lunch room and write furiously so that no one would think to talk to me. This sort of behavior has, in the past, helped people come to the understanding that I'm a standoffish bitch, but in reality, like a spider, I'm more afraid of you than you are of me. Eventually I got to the point where I wasn't afraid of my banking friends, so my plaid journal shield was no longer necessary. That's when I stopped writing in it regularly. I still have it, and it has far more content in it than any other journal I've ever tried to keep, but still...
I suppose the biggest reason I haven't felt the need to keep a journal over the past 4 years is that I don't have any private thoughts. I have a girlfriend. We share a life. Every third conversation that goes on between the two of us starts with, "Remember the time...?" And we do. We remember the time. So why, you would ask if you knew to, did I go out and buy a fancy new leather journal yesterday? Well let me tell you.
I don't know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line I became the sort of person who likes to read biographies of both the auto and not-so-auto variety. I also like history books. And I've noticed something. Famous and important people keep journals. They always have. What do Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf, and Doogie Howser all have in common? They are/were diary keepers.
The tipping point for me was with the book I'm reading now, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. It's about the shooting and subsequent death (more than 2 months later) of James Garfield. The book itself is interesting. His shooting never would have happened today since the guy who shot him would have been on everyone's radar from moment one. Oh, and we actually employ people to protect our presidents these days unlike in 1881 (yes, even after Lincoln), but the thing that has had the most profound impact on me to this point in my reading is--dude wrote shit down. The book is chalk full of excerpts from Garfield's journal. So I got to thinking, if keeping a diary is good enough for the 20th president of the United States, then by god it's good enough for me. Also, I like the smell of leather.
Like I said earlier, I bought the journal yesterday. Not wanting to waste any time, I decided to draw further inspiration from Mr. Garfield before attempting my own entry. Included in the pages that I read yesterday was a brief note from Garfield's diary written on the day he unwittingly came into contact with the man who would, just a couple weeks later, shoot and kill him. After future assassin Charles Guiteau showed up at Garfield's church and made an ass of himself, Garfield commented that Guiteau was, "a dull young man, with a loud voice, trying to pound noise into the question." Pretty boring, right? Well not once you add the context. I mean, that dull young man is plotting to kill the very man who finds him boring. Sometimes I want to shoot people who find me boring too. (Shh Carrie. Save those kinds of comments for the diary.) As I read Garfield's thoughts I think, my god, I could be shot tomorrow leaving nothing behind but some Ikea furniture and a well stocked bar to help historians piece together the puzzle of my mind.
A woman's diary is sacred, and it's possible that I won't feel safe pouring out my deepest darkest thoughts and desires if I break the trust by relaying here what I wrote there nearly 24 hours ago, but I can leave you with my entry's closing line, because some thoughts are too important to be kept under lock and heart shaped key. The line is, "I'm giving this journaling thing another try so that one day T & S can know for sure that I loved eating fish sticks with them." Just wait 130 years and that shit's going to blow your mind.
