Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The Beginning, Take 2

I think it's only fitting that my first (slash second) post here is about how terrible my memory is. Short-term, long-term, all equally bad. Case in point: this morning, I was clicking through some blogs and thought, oh hey. I started a blog about a month ago too! So I tried to go to it. I went to allinthedance.blogspot.com, then I tried wereallinthedance.blogspot.com, then I tried allindance.blogspot.com before I gave up and just logged into my gmail account. I must say it's a good freaking thing that blogspot and gmail are linked otherwise I never would've remembered my password and I would've given up on the blog thing altogether.

So all that being said, the thing that I love about writing and journaling and well nowadays emailing, is that I can go back and read exactly what I was thinking at a certain point in time. Because usually I can't actually remember. I used to really love (well, I still do) a good old-fashioned, hand-written letter. But the problem is, you pour your heart out in a letter, stuff it in an envelope, slap a stamp on it, send it off, and it's gone forever. I mean, unless your ex-boyfriend is just crazy and sentimental enough to tuck it away into a book for safe-keeping, and you're on good enough terms with him to say, "Hey you, remember that letter I wrote you when I was 16? Can I read it?" (Although hypothetically, just hypothetically, if I were to ever write a letter like that, I would obviously make a copy of it before licking the envelope... ) Anyway, I've been pretty introspective the last few days (a direct result of boy troubles, job troubles, and general quarter-life what-the-hell-am-i-doing-with-my-life troubles), which always puts me in a reading and writing mood. I write long-winded emails that I'm sure are really hard to respond to and I read back through old emails that I wrote to girlfriends, ex-boyfriends. The amazing thing is that whenever I'm emotional and start fishing through my inbox, the emails my exes wrote me don't make me cry (at least, not usually). No, it's my emails that make me cry. My own words make me cry. So I have no one to blame for my puffy eyes but myself!

More than that though, I'm really just surprised at my own words. Like, wait, was that me? Did I write that? Did I actually think that? Did I really feel that way about him? I guess my surprise is a result of being really good at compartmentalizing my feelings. Pushing them aside and just forgetting that they exist. So, the point is, I had initially planned on writing this blog completely in the third person. It was going to be an experimental ground for unrelated posts, loosely autobiographical but largely fictionalized. A collection of short stories and maybe on occasion, a baby novella of a few related stories. And while I think I probably will still post in that way every now and then, the point of this right now is more for me. For me to remember. For me to remember what it was like to be 26, living in New York in 2010. The ups and the downs. The good and the bad.

So here goes. Here's to remembering the present.

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