Author and Columnist
This is my first attempt at writing for a public I mostly am unfamiliar with.
Who would have thought that you would still be doing it twenty years later? The audience doesn't grow more robust. For the most part, this is exercise. You write to practice different styles using your life as fodder -- which the people in your life do not always appreciate -- and unlearn the bad habits instilled in you by well-meaning professors and haughty books.
Writing this journal is the best thing you ever did for your writing. It gave you a goal and an outlet, more so when you stopped writing to please an indifferent audience (I am sorry to tell you that you still have a long while before you reach that point). Still, when people ask you for writing advice -- and they do -- "keep an online diary" tends to follow "finish what you started before editing."
And rarely have I known what audience I am about to reach. So, have I reached you?
To the best of my knowledge, that answer is usually "no." Get past it. The internet avidly quotes you out of context, and you mine these entries for chapters in anthologies. Is it worth the money? Not in any ledger, but it is still to your benefit, even if no one else gets much from it.
At worst, you waste an hour of your time. But I would like to think no time was harmed in the writing of this.
I do not think I can fathom how much time it would take to read everything here and would not want to calculate how long you sat writing it.
She is honestly wonderful. She is a trifle too playful with my emotions, as they are genuine and not some remake of a turn of the century toy. But she is dear to me.
Eileen is, bless her, still partly a child, as you were at her age. This doesn't mean that you were not doing things too adult for you, but one should keep in mind that you provide precedent for being careless of other's caring.
Not that I have her. She insists in a coquettish fashion that we are merely friends. Incorrigible, truly.
In relationships, one tends to be the lowest relational level agreed upon. Eileen can flirt with you madly, but you are still only friends on the bottom line, no matter your infatuation.
My, how vacuous you must think me. We have just met and I have spent the bulk of my time since lamenting and cooing about a girl.
Well, if that isn't you in a nutshell. It is one of my more significant complaints about you. Everything is about some young woman, and little of it is about you except through extrapolation.
Shelly didn't want to hear you talk about your ex, if you recall. Readers are not captivated by yet another twenty-something with relationship issues. Present exes and future partners are not thrilled by it. Who knows who else has judged you for it, if only to find it tedious?
I assure you, it gets better. At least, I assume it does. Maybe you are reading this a year from when I wrote it.
Or twenty years.
Does this turn out well?
Eileen? No. Writing? Yes. Life? It has its ups and downs, but you live it as best you can (though not as best as I might in retrospect).
Do I get my heart shattered like an antique doll? How long until she definitively says yes or no?
No shattering that I recall. I remember that you suffered Eileen's definite conclusion (if it was definite) with relative grace. Please don't prove me wrong.
Am I happy a year from now?
"Happy" is a tricky thing to pin down. I have promised I will focus only on the entry before me and what I remember.
In a year, you are dating Emily. You are preparing to graduate from New Paltz. You have a crowd of friends who feel as though they will be in your life forever. They won't be, but it will be a while before you know this and a bit longer before you accept it.
Yeah, I think you are happy enough a year from now, but I've been wrong before.