![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Happy birthday to meeeee....
Jan. 7th, 2003 09:36 amSo here I am, looking at a journal that I haven't updated in five days, and frankly, I'm not terribly inclined to update it now. I'm disenchanted with...well, I was about to say "with life," but life is just fine; I seem to be losing the drive to share every belligerent phone company customer and child-altered piece of furniture with the world. In short, I've looked back at my recent life, and realized that I'm boring.
Here's a good example of how insufferably-dull-yet-self-involved I am: I've been working on this ongoing project of mine to catalog my life in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where I went to school. The seeds of this not-so-little project go way back, but the real work on it started in earnest this past year, with a lot of attention over the last week. Basically, it's an encyclopedia (working title: "The Lemmings' Encyclopedia"), listing any people, places, catchphrases, in-jokes, stories, events, groups, relationships, anything I can remember from my life between September 1989 to August 1993, with cross-references, color-coding, the works. I've already got about a hundred entries, can easily think of six hundred more, and have devoted countless hours on writing this thing up.
The sad thing is, I don't know why I'm doing this. I suppose it's all interesting, in a way, but perhaps only to me: my social group at the time was this weird, incestuous overlap between the Pagans, the jugglers, the Plato computer users, the Quakers, the medieval reenactment people, the Irish folk fans, and a little coterie of folks who met through one Jenny Gardner, all mushed up into this nebulous social thing. I've shown what I have to one or two people, who seemed to show some interest, and in the back of my head I have dreams of doing some one-off Spalding-Gray-Garrison-Keillor type deal based on these people and places (vanity at its highest). But I think the main reason is the knowledge that I'm beginning to forget what happened back then, and I desperately don't want to lose it all. I have very few souvenirs from that stage of my life, not even photos, so I guess this is my way of saving what I can. But, jeez, I left almost ten years ago; why am I still clinging on to this? And who on earth even cares about this stuff, aside from those who were there? Do they even care?
But it is my birthday today, so that's something to talk about. Kristi surprised me with Ani Difranco tickets (I must do the Happy Dance! Wheeee!) and a Williams-Sonoma gift certificate, and she & her parents chipped in for the swanky new computer chair that I'm parked on right now. Tonight, we'll be doing dinner at the Olde Bryan Inn in Saratoga, and already I've been advised multiple times by friends to try the coconut shrimp appetizer. I am so there...
Here's a good example of how insufferably-dull-yet-self-involved I am: I've been working on this ongoing project of mine to catalog my life in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where I went to school. The seeds of this not-so-little project go way back, but the real work on it started in earnest this past year, with a lot of attention over the last week. Basically, it's an encyclopedia (working title: "The Lemmings' Encyclopedia"), listing any people, places, catchphrases, in-jokes, stories, events, groups, relationships, anything I can remember from my life between September 1989 to August 1993, with cross-references, color-coding, the works. I've already got about a hundred entries, can easily think of six hundred more, and have devoted countless hours on writing this thing up.
The sad thing is, I don't know why I'm doing this. I suppose it's all interesting, in a way, but perhaps only to me: my social group at the time was this weird, incestuous overlap between the Pagans, the jugglers, the Plato computer users, the Quakers, the medieval reenactment people, the Irish folk fans, and a little coterie of folks who met through one Jenny Gardner, all mushed up into this nebulous social thing. I've shown what I have to one or two people, who seemed to show some interest, and in the back of my head I have dreams of doing some one-off Spalding-Gray-Garrison-Keillor type deal based on these people and places (vanity at its highest). But I think the main reason is the knowledge that I'm beginning to forget what happened back then, and I desperately don't want to lose it all. I have very few souvenirs from that stage of my life, not even photos, so I guess this is my way of saving what I can. But, jeez, I left almost ten years ago; why am I still clinging on to this? And who on earth even cares about this stuff, aside from those who were there? Do they even care?
But it is my birthday today, so that's something to talk about. Kristi surprised me with Ani Difranco tickets (I must do the Happy Dance! Wheeee!) and a Williams-Sonoma gift certificate, and she & her parents chipped in for the swanky new computer chair that I'm parked on right now. Tonight, we'll be doing dinner at the Olde Bryan Inn in Saratoga, and already I've been advised multiple times by friends to try the coconut shrimp appetizer. I am so there...
