Excerpts from my diary at ages 17 to 18:

A few things:
I don't dwell on the past. I don't plan ahead. I don't wear a watch that functions. I can totally relate to Smiths lyrics.

I used to think that I would have my life all figured out by 18. Why, I don't know. I also used to think all 80's music was lame.

Pretty much.

I feel too old for this in some ways. "Emotional hardcore" music, I mean. It's considered v. fourteen-years-old. I forgot about Sunny Day Real Estate. They weren't so bad, really. The first two albums anyway. Unfortunate that they inspired so many crap bands in the years since and just as unfortunate that I was not more discerning in my younger years and instead preferred...Incubus.

Youth is fleeting.

What the fuck am I saying? I'm seventeen.

Right now I think I can relate to like how Admiral James Stockdale must have felt at the vice presidential debate in 1992. "Who am I? Why am I here?" The second question isn't of much concern to me really, but adequately complements the first. I don't know the answer to that one. To quote a grouphug confession: "I don't know who I am. But at least I know I hate myself." Rather witty and incisive, I thought, yet so simple.

Haha, I think I was doing a report in Honors History about the '92 election when I wrote that one. Why that topic would be relevant, I don't know, something about third party candidates.

That idea I got to dig out my old diary from 7th - 9th grade last night was rather masochistic. Some things one tends to reflect on in similiar instances:
- How much I've changed and how much I'm still the same.
- Friendships fading in and out and going down in flames and all that.
- School, and how much it always sucked and reached the pinnacle of suckdom in grade 11.
- How true, so very true that Smiths lyric is. Oh! "I can smile about it now / but at the time it was terrible".

Every now and then, I have been momentarily nostalgic for then, as I have been for the past few months from time to time. It was a time before teen angst and hormones fucking up everything, but I've learned so much since then. I used to want to do it all over again sometimes.
But last night, reading that all again, it dawned on me: I was a fucking twerp. And still am, of course. But in a different way.

I was cringing even as I was writing this shit, knowing how lame it all was yet totally unable to do anything about it. I wish I'd had some sort of sweet outlet like soccer or skateboarding or playing music, but nah. Instead I was really into Flipper, Wire, a couple Slint songs I played endlessly, Drive Like Jehu, Born Against, and of course Neutral Milk Hotel. For that time, I was an angry 20-something wasteoid boy unemployed-and-drinking-on-the-porch-all-day type -- on the inside. Did I mention that I worked at a gas station, too? As a clerk? And basically was Dante in the movie Clerks before I escaped to college? Yeah.

I think I spend more time looking for new music than doing my work.
Four projects. I'm fucked.

It's just these next two weeks though. My life is not over. Lazy wanker.

In the words of Bukowski,
"perhaps living through these petty days will get us ready
for the dangerous ones."

That quote is awesome.

Perhaps I am depressed. I am reasonable in thought and logical in actions in comparison to my friends it seems but I never want to do anything. Everything is terrible or will be terrible. I don't have much interest in anything. M professed that she wanted to take a pill that would make everything bad go away. I wish for the same now.

Also for my stomach to stop hurting and to be thinner and that sort of stupid shit I thought I'd avoid at thirteen.

I feel like such a teenage girl but at the very least I am getting my work done.

weird, weird, weird. I found my paper journal from junior year. The prose is vaguely familiar but I hardly remember any of the events that happened that year, save the whole listless torpidity and wondering-why-I-was-alive aspects.

Less interested in the news of the world, politics, that sort -- and getting all angry about it. More interested in self-furthering activities and ideas. Less interested in new things and more appreciative of the past (yet, importantly, not wanting to relive the past anymore). Trying not to dismiss things before experiencing them firsthand. Not wanting to repeat the same mistakes.
And so begins a, from what I'm told, common post-high school transformation. Maturation, perhaps? The first of many revelations? I hope so something fierce. It seems ingrained in me, this whole path to some sort of better, more aware self. I don't think it's like what my friends or others I know/knew are going through. At least, not to my knowledge. They seem more interested in experimenting with the illegal substances and dull boys at our disposal - wholly mundane. [just kidding! I love that shit]
Maybe at least part of my predicament stems from comparing myself to my peers. Not to sound wonky, but I usually find that I don't share the same aspirations that most all of them do. I've yet to find someone other than M who more than kind of understands where I'm coming from.

And then I got into my first choice college (well, really the only one I ended up applying to). I would go on to: have a love/hate relationship with it (and accrued a lot of debt), found more music, met a ton of awesome people (as well as a ton of total shitheads but who cares about them?), had weird crushes, made out with a lot of people, got laid, had a few disastrous relationships, got a life, regressed, and now things are on the upswing again. Also, at some point some point I figured out that living in your head is boring.

I want to get a bicycle and go to New Zealand and never come back. At the very least, get a bicycle and go to Portland this summer. Get the fuck out for awhile.

And then it strikes me!

Ah, so this is why older folks tell me that they wish they were my age again.

I have no real commitments or attachments to anything, really. A most intriguing (and frightening) realization!

Well, if anything, at least I didn't have to pretend to be weird. Sylvia Plath described herself at that age as a "rabid teenage pragmatist" and I liked to think that description applies as well. Still haven't gone to either Portland, Oregon (Maine, however, yes) or New Zealand.

And yes indeed, I was (and some would argue, remain) insufferable -- most of all to myself!