Sunday, September 18, 2005

Journals, the keeping thereof

So, I've never been a consistent journal writer. Usually only in times of crisis. At least with the blog, I know there's some readers, so I can mention something fun from time to time. But with the journal, who cares, really? Especially when I re-read what I wrote my freshman year of college. God, what tripe! I really thought that stuff mattered? All I see is a self-involved adolescent with an undiagnosed clinical depression. Eek.

So, I threw it out when we moved. Along with all that bad poetry I wrote beginning in elementary school and carefully re-copied into bound books. I know, I know, tossing stuff. My father frowns on it, finding stories in everything.

I have hung on to all those photographs. Maybe I'll share a few with you, though I'm not sure what the correct protocol is with folks in pictures. Should I put a black bar across their eyes? Or just assume no one will recognize a 40-something-year-old as a child?

Just be thankful I'm not publishing any of my bad poems here. Like the one about the mouse in a house of ill repute...what kind of freaky teenager writes about stuff like that?!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I threw away a lot of high school & college stuff this past summer, too, but I need to find a way of destroying my journals from that time. I don't want anyone picking through my garbage and finding out what I was thinking when I was 13. (Particularly that Ivan Tribble guy.)

Anonymous said...

Oh, but I would be very interested in a poem about a mouse in a house of ill repute! What does that say about me?

Krista

senioritis said...

I do wish I had all the journals, but I used to throw them away annually, because I found them so embarrassing. And if I had them now, I'd probably be really ashamed of them. But I do wish I'd kept them. I HAVE kept them since about 1991--when I started keeping them electronically.