Nostalgia is a funny thing. It sneaks up on you the older you get. I had lunch with my friend Fern yesterday and she handed me two hand-written poems I had written for her when we were teenagers. One was about the street sweepers that keep Green Bay’s streets clean (they used to scare both of us because they’d sweep at night and you’d be lying in bed and suddenly hear it coming and see these flashing yellow and red lights and it would get louder and louder and LOUDER and then recede back into your nightmares.) and one was about binging, an obvious first and only draft, because it had words crossed out in a flurry of loops and swirlies. It was a strange thing, though, looking through those foolish teenage swirls. I don’t even remember writing the one about binging, but I remember the street cleaner poem because even though it was tongue-in-cheek, it had some elements that I loved. Sometimes I think I prove my grandmother right time and again. I really do just like to hear myself talk.
The cynic in me wants to spout about how nostalgia is sweet tea for the insipid, but the honest truth is that a diary is nothing but nostalgia. Or at least mine is. I often tell stories about something that happened before. The older you get, the faster nostalgia sneaks up on you. This diary is like a time capsule in a way. It allows me to read back through last summer and the summer before that and grasp at that place and that time. When I wrote my first real entry, I was sitting in Computer Room #2 and the sun was shining and I remember looking out into the little courtyard part of our backyard, the place where the house makes an L around the potting shed, and staring at the climbing rose bush. I remember thinking that I needed to replace the trellis (still haven’t, although I do have a replacement).
The nostalgia is probably the sweetest thing I have about this archive. It tells me where my mind was at a certain point on any given day. It might not say everything that happened or everything I thought, but it’s a snapshot of the fifteen minutes or hour that I stopped and wrote an entry. The easiest and best time travel device is the dialogue. There’s the first one I had with Esteban that I linked in the FAQ entry as being my favorite. There’s a powerful lot of pillow talk recorded on this page:
Reasons Why Esteban is a Poor Spouse
The Fictionalized Valentines Day
The One Which Shall Not Be Named
Esteban Is Still Sometimes a Bad Spouse
The Soup (not technically in the format though)
And then there’s the dialogues I have with other people:
To embrace even more of the meta, I’m a bit boggled by the popularity of this thing. It’s a strange and also wonderful thing. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to have condolences when my cat died. Or during lingering illness and eventual death of a much-loved family member. I’m thankful for every comment left and I try to answer every email. But at the same time, I still scratch my head. Sometimes I just write about how I don’t have anything to write about. I write an awful lot about being a girl, yet I still have a fairly large percentage of male readers. And then there’s the uterus entries‘ subjects that I would have thought would have driven away most of the testosterone long ago. Some people tell me I’m funny, but it’s just who I am. And I’m not funny all the time. It’s a bit of a mystery, but one I’ll gladly ponder. Because of it, I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to meet some great people. And made a friend.
I suppose that the nostalgia for you the reader is different than the nostalgia I have for the diary. You might have nostalgia for what is presented. Remember that time I got drunk? Or that other time I got drunk? Or the time I wrote while stoned on nitrous oxide? Or all the letters? Remember that? The time I wrote to John Irving? Dave Matthews? Michelle Branch? Johnny Depp? Steve from Blues Clues?Or remember that letter to God about American Idol? I doubt he reads this page, but you never know. I get some pretty weird servers on my stats meter (oh, and you guys who are reading from Oxford, Duke and Harvard should really be studying instead of reading about boobs and farts. I’m just saying.) Or the letters to Mattel and Mentos? Speaking of genetic mutants, what about those letters to Sarah Jessica Parker, Tom Arnold, Wil Ferrell, Anne Heche, and Mariah Carey? Those have gone unanswered, by the way. Remember that?
Remember my old blue template with the white writing? Remember that? Wasn’t that great? Remember when I only had a guestbook? Remember when people used to actually use the message board? Remember that? Remember the first time you saw Chubby Tink and thought ‘what the heck is up with that shit? She have an allergic reaction or some shit?’ Remember that? Remember the first time you used ‘Gah’ in a sentence? Out loud at work? And everyone looked at you like you had Tourettes? Remember that? Wasn’t that incredible? It felt weird the first time, like eating an under ripe banana, but pretty soon it was like a bad case of herpes and you just couldn’t get rid of it? Wasn’t that just the neatest thing?
Remember when you started to read this entry? Remember thinking ‘Wow, that’s a hella lot of linking and I know Weet really hates to do a lot of html’. I remember that. I remember that like it was five minutes ago. I was sitting here listening to Rufus Wainwright, just like I am now, isn’t that strange? I can hardly believe it’s already been more than three hours. I remember starting this entry and being nervous about writing my 500th entry and not having a clue how to start it and feeling nervous because I didn’t want to look up all of those entries and write all of those links. Remember that nostalgia thing, what I said about that? Wasn’t that just like me? Wasn’t it?
Yeah. I thought so too.
