Reading old diaries is an interesting experience.
For one, I've known some damned fucked up people.
When I lived in Austin, I had a roommate, Tammy. Now, I've always told people about her. She was a virgin mormon stripper that liked to dress up in sexually provocative clothes, with large amounts of makeup, in a neighborhood that was basically hooker row, then get irate when guys would honk at her or yell comments.
But there was more. So much more.
For example, I'd forgotten about some of her crazy antics. I'd forgotten how fond she was of calling me paranoid. One time, I had just finished eating some pasta with garlic alfredo. Tammy offered me a mint.
"heh, does my breath stink?" I joked.
"Oh, I'm used to your breath by now." She said.
Well, of course, I was concerned about this. When I expressed concern I was greeted with "what? no, I just meant after you eat garlic! You're paranoid!"
In retrospect this is pretty funny. I mean an offhanded comment like that could cause concern in most people, or at least most people who don't desire to offend others with their breath.
But wait, there's more...
At one point, I had a crush on one of my neighbors. Tammy didn't know him, but I'd described him to her and he was pretty recognizable by description. She decided to go up to him and start a conversation to figure out what he was all "about". Then, she came home and told me about it. Stated that she had flirted with him and suggested that she invite him over and then she can leave us alone so we could "hook up".
Um. No.
I pointed out that he might figure out what was going on.
"What? No!" She insisted. "You're really paranoid, you know that?"
"Well, regardless, try to play matchmaker and I'll kill you."
Reading all of this, I became grateful for the life I have now.
I mean, not only do I have a really cool boyfriend that I share a great apartment with, but most of my friends are relatively sane by comparison. You know, they're fairly honest people but they have this underrated quality known as diplomacy. They all have another underrated quality, intellect.
I mean compare and contrast: crazy virgin mormon stripper, desperately obsessed with my love life or folks that do voice over for my weird animation projects and talk about cult horror movies until the wee hours of the morning. You decide.
It's trite, but life really does get better with age. It doesn't always seem that way. Nostalgia has a way of coloring things to make them better than they are. That's why I highly recomend keeping a diary, and why I want to get serious about mine again.
Well, of course, I'm pretty religious about my web diary project, but I need to allot at least half an hour a day to writing in my super-secret-diary. These days, it seems to serve as more of a paperweight for my purse than anything else. But it's amazing how much you learn from reading the thoughts you had five years ago. And if I want to be able to draw from that in a few years, I need to get off my ass.