04.02.2003 - 11:57 a.m.

Looking back on old entries, I still notice the words I used because I refused to write what I really meant. I�ve long since forgotten what I really meant. I can remember the moments I described but not the moments immediately before or after. I�ve written myself into an alternate history, to the point that I wouldn�t necessarily recognize the one I actually lived.

Certainly, if you asked me what I�d been up to for the last two years, I�d be able to tell you without referencing the diary. I�d talk about living in different apartments, with different people, about getting my cat, about work, about dating, about the ebb and flow of friendship. In fact there are very few of the landmark moments in my diary, and the ones that are there have been coded, polished, poeticized. Very few of my entries are memories I would have kept if I hadn�t written them down.

It�s just that I also know that very few of the memories I wrote were completely faithful to my life, version 1.0. Do you guys do that? I always seem to start with a straight report of a thought or event or desire, but then it reminds me of something else, and something beyond that, and soon I am writing an essay about what I would have thought or done or wanted, if life had given me room to finish thinking at the time.

But then I admitted that in my profile. This is where I finish thinking.

In this moment I am sitting in my office with my feet propped up under my laptop, the air smells of the garlic in my lunch (which I did not wait until lunchtime to eat), and the files behind this entry box are way more important to work on but also too important to want to start. Reading this a year from now, will I remember what my lunch was packed in? Will I picture the diaryland entry box, or the word file �entry.doc� I often use beforehand? A small, silly example, I know, but you have to wonder if the phenomena translates to that week early in 2002 when I wrote about loneliness in general when the reality was loneliness in specific. Because I don�t remember any more, specific to who. If I�d lied, would I believe it by now? Did I lie?

I know, I know, this is thinking too much, turning too many things over on themselves just because I can, and not because they matter. But you know, it�s fun. The relationship between life and itself interests me. And after all, this isn�t just where I finish thinking. This is also where I procrastinate.

Anything important enough to do well is certainly important enough to wait while I post an entry about writing entries. Heh.

-stonebridge

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