rachelleneveu | It's like a Time Capsule, kind of. Ish. (Reply)

A few days ago, after a conversation with the lovely Harper, I decided to look at some of the old notebooks I have stashed away on my bookshelf. Now, the thing is, I love spiral notebooks. I do. I've been writing in them since I was old enough to hold a pen, and because I want to have an archive of my life (read as, "I'm a pack rat who never throws anything away"), I've still got almost every single notebook I've had since middle school.

Anyway, talking about how we've "evolved as writers" made me want to look back and see how far I've come. Here's what I've learned so far:

My handwriting was terrible back then, even in the early-high school notebooks. I'm right-handed, and I know my penmanship isn't the best - I like loops too much, it's always tiny, and more than once I've been told all my Z's look like 2's. But in my old notebooks, it looks like my words were fucking carved into the paper with a very, very sharp crayon.
I used to love Random Capitalization. Okay...seriously, Past Me? Capitalizing "Every Single Morning" in the middle of a sentence where nothing else is isn't "edgy" or "emphatic". It's annoying. My apologies go out to anyone who had to suffer through that if I asked you to read something I wrote (which, on further reflection, is about three people...only one of whom actually has an active LJ. Sorry, dear!)
My sister was the subject of a lot of my written rage. Understandable. She still can be, sometimes. Just because I love the brat doesn't mean I have to like her, and all that jazz.
I went through a phase, apparently, where everything I wrote was in "code". Like, pictures and backwards letters and "symbols" instead of actual words - obviously done so that no one could read my super-important thoughts or try and steal my ideas. Totally. The sad part? After a few moments of staring blankly at the page, I could actually remember what the codes meant. :-S
There's one page of a yellow sprial dedicated to a single, gigantic message: "Caitlin Lewis + Michelle Puglia got Busted on 7/31/03 for Smoking Weed." Ohhh man, now that is a blast from the past! I haven't even thought about those girls since graduation. Weird.
OH MY GOD. I WROTE MOULIN ROUGE FANFICTION. It's not more than a page - some nattering nonsense about Nini and the Argentinian getting together after the end of the movie - but holy fuck. I didn't get into writing fanfic until around my sophomore year of high school - one of the few things I am grateful to Blondie for - so this is weird to see. I don't think in eighth grade I even knew what fanfic was, let alone that there were thousands of websites dedicated to that sole genre. (Fun Fact: I still kind-of-sort-of pair the two of them together. Forget Christian and Satine - the dance sequence they had in in El Tango de Roxanne pretty much made the movie for me.)
According to a red notebook from (I think) seventh-grade(ish), I had outlined an entire plan to run away from home and live at the Genesee Country Museum, or "Mumford". I don't know why I was planning on running away, but Mumford would have been a good place to run to. Also, apparently walking from my house to Mumford - an hour-and-a-half drive on a good day - would have only taken me two days and is proven by science. No, really, there are calculations in the margins and everything!
I was inordinately fond of writing down the lyrics to songs in the covers of my notebooks. Mostly Beatles tunes - Eleanor Rigby, The Ballad of John and Yoko, Yesterday, and so forth - but there's a few that have Neil Diamond and Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, and one with nothing but Matchbox Twenty. Good to see that Past Me had decent taste in music?
My poetry actually wasn't half bad. The prose isn't ridiculously purple, there's no real rhyme scheme, the syntax is a little off, and most of the eighth grade notebooks have stuff obviously written with Pineapple Boy in mind, but I like some of the lines I came up with. And, to be fair, I still can't rhyme to save my life, lol.
I had an actually-kind-of-okay idea for a murder mystery. Hmm...maybe I could polish it up and make it into a real story, instead of just random scribblings on a page? I might have to look into this...

As embarassing as some of these things are, it's good to see that I have actually grown as both a writer and a person since I started these notebooks. But just because I've "accepted" this, it doesn't mean that anyone else will ever see how bad everything was until I'm dead and no longer have to suffer through the teasing that would inevitably follow. I still might have to haunt them, though. Just for kicks. :o)