Weekend Thoughts

With the husband in India, I took a weekend to catch up with friends at Marvin and saw Jenny's new house.  I finally bought two barstools at Pier One, and I watched lots of old youtube videos and reflected on entertainment past. Vague? It is so easy to get caught up in old memories of soaps gone past, now nearly two decades old (well, older).  How did time pass so?

I find it painful to go through old journals that I kept up with for so long.  I was so young, such a teenager, and I was achingly lonely at times.  But cautiously, optimistically hopeful, because a small part of me knew that life would go on and not end in 8 Mile suburbs.  But at the same time, there is a tinge of regret now, because I really was not living in the present, but yearning for something that I assumed would be more fulfilling.  And is it? Life is not as romantic as you hope for it to be at 15. Life is far more complicated that youtube scenes presented it to be. I almost willed myself to forget so much of that, and the internet now makes it far too easy to sink into that abyss yet again. I fight it, though, and yet I drift back.

It did strike me that I was not such a bad writer then.  Maybe I have regressed? The best way to improve your writing is to write a lot, and I wrote pages and pages of journals and diaries back then.  It filled a void, which was conversation with many real friends.  But it left a record so that I cannot create a fully revisionist history of those years.

Was it really 18 years ago when that ended, a half lifetime ago? How in the world did I get to a half lifetime later? I started my first daily journal in 1987, a quarter of a century ago. I was ten. And I kept it up until the early 2000s, and reading a few entries, if only I knew then what I know now.  But that would not be so much fun, no?