It used to be that I could go into practically any clothing store and within half-an-hour I’d have found at least five things that I loved and just absolutely had to buy, and that was after I’d weeded out the things I really, really liked but could live without. I can’t do that anymore (which is good for my wallet, I guess). Partly this is because I’m much more picky than I used to be (my jeans have to fit exactly a certain way or I won’t buy them, for example). But mostly it’s because fashion has gone to hell in and handbasket.
I think it started with skinny jeans. I remember walking around my high school and wondering why on earth tapered jeans, as I’d always heard them called on “What Not to Wear,” were suddenly in style again. The thing about skinny jeans is that they really only look good on you if you weigh about three pounds and have no hips whatsoever. But somehow the stores have all got it into their heads that every single teenager and young twenty-something in America, no matter what their body type, wants to wear skinny jeans, so this is all you’ll find in the junior’s department of many stores and it’s all you’ll find period at places like Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters. Why don’t I just shop in the women’s department? Because it’s impossible to find low-rise jeans there and that’s all I feel comfortable in, that’s why.
But I could live with the skinny jeans. It’s hard, but not impossible, to find jeans I like and I know where to go. And today I wasn’t even shopping for jeans. My weight loss has finally caught up to the stash of old skirts that I couldn’t bear to get rid of, even when they were too small, so I went out to look for a new one. I used to love skirts…a few years ago when flowing knee-length skirts were in style. Now it seems the preference is for those ridiculously short things that have giant elastic waste bands, which, like skinny jeans, only look good if you’re small enough to blow away in the wind.
And don’t even get my started on those one-piece romper suit things. I swear to you, some designer was sitting in his or her office and said, “What can I come up with that will look totally ridiculous, but will be a crazy fashion trend?” That’s how we got the rompers. And now that designer is sitting in his or her office laughing at everyone stupid enough to wear them. Ditto those dumb sandals with the strap up the middle of the foot that everyone is wearing this summer.
I’ll continue my skirt hunt, of course, once I think up some stores I haven’t been to already. I’ll probably stumble onto a place I haven’t tried before, walk in, find five things that I just have to have (none of which will be a skirt), and spend way too much money. If you see me there, I’ll be the one in the nice, flattering boot-cut jeans.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
A Decade of Diaries
Ten years ago today I picked up a notebook and pen and started writing.
It all started with Anne Frank. I know that probably sounds weird, but it’s true. I had been reading about her, about her short life, her tragic death, and her famous diary. I was struck by her ability to confide in her diary almost like it was a person, a friend, like it was listening. I wanted to do that, too. So, one day in the grocery store I asked my mom if I could have a notebook. I went home with one of those black and white composition books, which I stashed in some corner of my bedroom and promptly forgot about. Until a few days later when I fished it out of whatever pile it got stuck in, opened it up, and started writing. It was Wednesday July 12, 2000. I was ten years old.
“This is my new notebook, and in here I can write anything I want.” That’s all it took. My little notebook and I were instant friends. I wrote page after page about anything and everything: what we did that day, how much my sister annoyed me, how anxious I was for school to start again (I was a strange little ten-year-old), how many days there were until we left for our big trip to California. It didn’t matter how upset I was, how misunderstood I felt, how many pages I wanted to fill, my notebook was there to listen. Even then, I knew I had stumbled onto something wonderful.
That notebook lasted for two years, although I would sometimes go for months without writing. I wrote mostly in the summer, those three golden months that were wonderfully and yet painfully endless to a ten, eleven, twelve-year-old. That first diary, or “Notebook,” as I came to call it, is hard to read today because I didn’t bother with punctuation or paragraphs, I didn’t skip a line between entries, and I had a fondness for pens with brightly colored, headache inducing ink. Even when I can make it out, my writing is not very interesting. My sister was driving me crazy, we went somewhere and did something, and there were X number of days until the next really exciting thing was to happen. But it wasn’t about going back and reading it later, it was about writing it here and now. Writing had become something I needed, something that was as much a part of me as breathing.
I filled Notebook’s last page on August 25, 2002, the day before I started junior high. I had a replacement diary all picked out, this one a sort of electric blue, but for a long time, I just didn’t feel much like writing. I wasn’t used to writing during the school year and junior high was a complicated thing. There was too much going on for me to process it enough to write it down, even in my loose, punctuation-free writing style. But I was also into the “Dear America” series, and reading all those diaries made me long for my own. Once again it was historical figures (albeit slightly more fictionalized this time) that inspired me to find my notebook and start writing. On October 28, 2002, my second diary was begun.
I called this one Lissi, which was a nickname I had tried to give myself some years earlier, with little success. Lissi was immediately different than Notebook. But then again, so was I. I had become a history freak, realizing for the first time that the past was something that had actually happened and I was more and more determined to make it happen to me, stuck in 2002 though I was. I drifted further away from the real world and further into a world that was inhabited by me, my diary, and people who started out as imaginary friends of sorts, but would eventually become fictional characters. My diary was my sidekick, my best friend, my confidant. I carried Lissi everywhere with me: to bookstores, restaurants, movie theaters, even occasionally to school. We had a wonderful time, and for years afterward I held that winter up on a pedestal, certain that if I could recreate it then I would be happy forever.
Lissi lasted only six months. By April 2003 I was writing to my third diary, Chickie. And that was it. There was no going back. I was a diary-keeper. When one diary got close to being full (they generally lasted about four to six months, back then), I would search for a new one. By the time I acquired my fourth diary, Bel, in the summer of 2003, this had become a complicated process that only ended when I had a feeling of “knowing” that this particular blank book was to be my next diary. And once I had my future diary picked out, I had to come up with a name, and the name had to be perfect because I would use it the entire time I wrote to that diary.
I saw my diaries almost as people, so much so that I often wrote to them in the second person. Each one had its own personality, its own stories, its own inside jokes. I formed deeper bonds with some diaries than I did with others. Some lasted such a short time that I hardly “got to know” them. Some lasted so long that I got tired of them. It was not uncommon for me to fill the last twenty or so pages of a diary on a single summer night because it was “time” for that diary to be full. I would take my diaries almost anywhere, writing pages and pages every day, especially on weekends and during school breaks. Often I wrote not because I had anything interesting to say, but because I simply needed to write.
My diaries and I even established traditions. Every year on Magic Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving) I would take my diary to school with me and make sure to write at least once while I was there. This was the only time I brought them to school. When I started a new diary, I would list all of the previous ones before telling my new diary its name. Sometimes we would have “countdowns,” tediously marking off days until something important happened. And every year on July 12, I would note how many years I had been keeping a diary. They really were my best friends. It seems almost narcissistic now to admit that for years I was essentially my own best friend. But I didn’t have other friends back then. My diaries weren’t just my best friends, they were my only friends.
As I got older, my diaries began to fade into the background. My schedule was busier. School work took more of my time. I didn’t have endless hours with nothing to do. Real friends began to fill the void that my diaries once had. But I still kept writing. I still picked out new diaries and gave them names and tried to write as much as I could as often as I could. I didn’t carry them around town with me anymore, although I followed the Magic Wednesday tradition right through my senior year of high school. They still seemed almost like people to me, but they started to lose their individual "personalities" after awhile. I had grown up, and so had they, although I still write more or less the way I always have. “It is strange, I suppose,” I wrote the day I began my most recent diary, “that I am 20 years old and I still anthropomorphize my diaries as I did when I was 13. But I have never written any other way.”
I’ve had sixteen of them now. Notebook, Lissi, Chickie, Bel, Autumn, Izzy, Pinkie, Special, Inkheart, Purity, Caro, Renaissance, Grace, Truth, Percy, and Hope. They all have their own stories, their own beginnings, middles, and ends, their own climaxes and resolutions. They are the closest thing I will ever have to moments frozen in time.
Everything has changed and then changed again in the last ten years, but my diaries have been my one constant. I have always known that no matter what happens they will always be there whenever I need them. I can’t be certain of much, but I am certain that I will never stop writing. I don’t think I would know how.
It all started with Anne Frank. I know that probably sounds weird, but it’s true. I had been reading about her, about her short life, her tragic death, and her famous diary. I was struck by her ability to confide in her diary almost like it was a person, a friend, like it was listening. I wanted to do that, too. So, one day in the grocery store I asked my mom if I could have a notebook. I went home with one of those black and white composition books, which I stashed in some corner of my bedroom and promptly forgot about. Until a few days later when I fished it out of whatever pile it got stuck in, opened it up, and started writing. It was Wednesday July 12, 2000. I was ten years old.
“This is my new notebook, and in here I can write anything I want.” That’s all it took. My little notebook and I were instant friends. I wrote page after page about anything and everything: what we did that day, how much my sister annoyed me, how anxious I was for school to start again (I was a strange little ten-year-old), how many days there were until we left for our big trip to California. It didn’t matter how upset I was, how misunderstood I felt, how many pages I wanted to fill, my notebook was there to listen. Even then, I knew I had stumbled onto something wonderful.
That notebook lasted for two years, although I would sometimes go for months without writing. I wrote mostly in the summer, those three golden months that were wonderfully and yet painfully endless to a ten, eleven, twelve-year-old. That first diary, or “Notebook,” as I came to call it, is hard to read today because I didn’t bother with punctuation or paragraphs, I didn’t skip a line between entries, and I had a fondness for pens with brightly colored, headache inducing ink. Even when I can make it out, my writing is not very interesting. My sister was driving me crazy, we went somewhere and did something, and there were X number of days until the next really exciting thing was to happen. But it wasn’t about going back and reading it later, it was about writing it here and now. Writing had become something I needed, something that was as much a part of me as breathing.
I filled Notebook’s last page on August 25, 2002, the day before I started junior high. I had a replacement diary all picked out, this one a sort of electric blue, but for a long time, I just didn’t feel much like writing. I wasn’t used to writing during the school year and junior high was a complicated thing. There was too much going on for me to process it enough to write it down, even in my loose, punctuation-free writing style. But I was also into the “Dear America” series, and reading all those diaries made me long for my own. Once again it was historical figures (albeit slightly more fictionalized this time) that inspired me to find my notebook and start writing. On October 28, 2002, my second diary was begun.
I called this one Lissi, which was a nickname I had tried to give myself some years earlier, with little success. Lissi was immediately different than Notebook. But then again, so was I. I had become a history freak, realizing for the first time that the past was something that had actually happened and I was more and more determined to make it happen to me, stuck in 2002 though I was. I drifted further away from the real world and further into a world that was inhabited by me, my diary, and people who started out as imaginary friends of sorts, but would eventually become fictional characters. My diary was my sidekick, my best friend, my confidant. I carried Lissi everywhere with me: to bookstores, restaurants, movie theaters, even occasionally to school. We had a wonderful time, and for years afterward I held that winter up on a pedestal, certain that if I could recreate it then I would be happy forever.
Lissi lasted only six months. By April 2003 I was writing to my third diary, Chickie. And that was it. There was no going back. I was a diary-keeper. When one diary got close to being full (they generally lasted about four to six months, back then), I would search for a new one. By the time I acquired my fourth diary, Bel, in the summer of 2003, this had become a complicated process that only ended when I had a feeling of “knowing” that this particular blank book was to be my next diary. And once I had my future diary picked out, I had to come up with a name, and the name had to be perfect because I would use it the entire time I wrote to that diary.
I saw my diaries almost as people, so much so that I often wrote to them in the second person. Each one had its own personality, its own stories, its own inside jokes. I formed deeper bonds with some diaries than I did with others. Some lasted such a short time that I hardly “got to know” them. Some lasted so long that I got tired of them. It was not uncommon for me to fill the last twenty or so pages of a diary on a single summer night because it was “time” for that diary to be full. I would take my diaries almost anywhere, writing pages and pages every day, especially on weekends and during school breaks. Often I wrote not because I had anything interesting to say, but because I simply needed to write.
My diaries and I even established traditions. Every year on Magic Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving) I would take my diary to school with me and make sure to write at least once while I was there. This was the only time I brought them to school. When I started a new diary, I would list all of the previous ones before telling my new diary its name. Sometimes we would have “countdowns,” tediously marking off days until something important happened. And every year on July 12, I would note how many years I had been keeping a diary. They really were my best friends. It seems almost narcissistic now to admit that for years I was essentially my own best friend. But I didn’t have other friends back then. My diaries weren’t just my best friends, they were my only friends.
As I got older, my diaries began to fade into the background. My schedule was busier. School work took more of my time. I didn’t have endless hours with nothing to do. Real friends began to fill the void that my diaries once had. But I still kept writing. I still picked out new diaries and gave them names and tried to write as much as I could as often as I could. I didn’t carry them around town with me anymore, although I followed the Magic Wednesday tradition right through my senior year of high school. They still seemed almost like people to me, but they started to lose their individual "personalities" after awhile. I had grown up, and so had they, although I still write more or less the way I always have. “It is strange, I suppose,” I wrote the day I began my most recent diary, “that I am 20 years old and I still anthropomorphize my diaries as I did when I was 13. But I have never written any other way.”
I’ve had sixteen of them now. Notebook, Lissi, Chickie, Bel, Autumn, Izzy, Pinkie, Special, Inkheart, Purity, Caro, Renaissance, Grace, Truth, Percy, and Hope. They all have their own stories, their own beginnings, middles, and ends, their own climaxes and resolutions. They are the closest thing I will ever have to moments frozen in time.
Everything has changed and then changed again in the last ten years, but my diaries have been my one constant. I have always known that no matter what happens they will always be there whenever I need them. I can’t be certain of much, but I am certain that I will never stop writing. I don’t think I would know how.
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