Journals

I was just reading a review of a book I'll likely never read that referenced a scene in which the narrator refers to a room of his house where one wall is concealed floor-to-ceiling with journals, some of which are written in huckleberry juice. This immediately made me think of Fight Club, when Edward Norton is reading stacks of old books and magazines rotting away in a house with leaky ceilings and sporadic electricity. But I also wondered, how long would it take to read all that stuff?

When you consider how long it takes you to write a page versus read one, it's pretty clear you could do it up until a certain point in your life, even if you wrote in your journal everyday. The serial killers and mentally ill you read about may even write all day everyday to accumulate their libraries. But there would eventually come a time in everyone's life when it will become impossible to read everything you had written up to that point in the remaining life left to you.

This blog is only the fourth journal I have ever kept, following an English class assignment, my travels on my semester abroad, and "Notes from the Road", published here in February 2004. My roommate keeps journals, and when he comes to the end of one, he re-reads what he's written before starting the next one.

Now imagine how much better of a grasp you could have on your own history if you were to read your journals all the way from the beginning to the present. Memory is unreliable, personality is malleable, but the written word doesn't change. Assuming you weren't making things up, and allowing for the fact that you may have consciously or unconsciously held things back when writing, you may discover truths that you were blind to at the time and gain real insight into yourself. Or you may just unearth forgotten memories and the faces of lost friends, like looking through a photo album.

But this is the promise of blogging for me, and probably many others, keeping a record and being able to reflect on it in the future. Sometimes we lose ourselves to our circumstances or surroundings, and this is a new tool available to us to find our way back. It's up to each individual whether or not to let others peek in at the same time, like handing someone your diary, and here's the difference: almost everyone blogs for the world, while reading someone's diary is still an intimate act, and done without permission, a violation. I don't know if that's a sign of the connected world's narcissism or truly a blossoming of openness in expression, but it feels like a good thing to me.

Lovesick

I haven't had many relationships, and they've all been short except one, which probably doesn't count as a relationship since we were living hundreds of miles away from each other for most of it. I don't have the experience of most people my age, and lately I've felt that lack.

One day I woke up and realized I was bald, a bit overweight, and feeling old, and it occurred to me that I might never have the chance to make someone else happy and fall in love. That was a scary moment. In some Asian countries, due to the preference for male babies over girls, there is now a 3-1 ratio, and since very few have the means to leave, there's going to be a large population of men that simply never get a chance to start a family. I read this fact has been identified as a threat to the future security of the world, as men who can't find an outlet for their emotions are more susceptible to manipulation by terrorist recruiters, cults, and the like. While that's thankfully not the case here in the U.S., the fact is the longer you wait, the harder and more uncertain it is when you start seriously looking, at least in my experience.

I spent years as a single guy with no attachments, and someone was recently telling me how studies have shown relationships are harder to maintain for people like me because they're used to getting their way to a large extent, and doing what they please. This makes me fear I may have grown selfish with my time and energy, and while I have tried to meet people and dated some in that same timeframe, I really wish I had made more of an effort now. Part of it was circumstance, probably some of it was arrested development, but I can't deny that it was also lack of interest. I felt like there was no hurry, and while that was true of getting married, say, it wasn't true of learning how to love someone.

Which is a long way of saying, when you do fall in love, you realize what you've been missing, and cherish it all the more, regardless of whatever else may be wrong.

I can already hear the counter-argument from those who fell in love at a young age only to be hurt repeatedly, and it's true I don't know if it's worse or better than the heartbreaks when love fails. But right now, I have to side with the poet who said "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all." Because the feeling of loving someone is worth having, and holding onto, even when it's not returned. I can only imagine how much better it must be when it is.