My Old Blog

Not many people can review their own thoughts like I can. I have nearly a decade of personal journals and saved emails.

My first saved email at my Yahoo account is from 1998 to mezmrin@aol.com:

i got this new e-mail address that i can access from anywhere, so I don’t have to have my own computer. you can write me here when I’m in taiwan, or even when i’m travelling if i happen to stop by an internet cafe. call me a fool; i’ve got some news about myself and some young girl that i work with that might interest you. alright, i’m out,

dude

Hey, in 1998 webmail was still pretty new. I seem pretty amazed by it. I have no idea who the “young girl that i work with” is. My memory isn’t what it used to be….and it was never that good.

I remember Billy Joel was talking about playing his old songs live and needing the sheet music. Sometimes he’d read words he’d written and think, “Man, that’s pretty good. I forgot I’d written that.”

That’s the way I feel. I forget some of the stuff I said altogether and with other stuff I think, “I couldn’t have said it better myself…” But I guess I did say it myself.

Here is an excerpt from an email a year later, when I was about to leave Taiwan. I must’ve had a fever or something. I seem sort of frantic.

phewwww..
i am really sick now….the phone went out today and i have spent all morning trying to get it fixed so i can make calls about my tickets and such….the apartment is empty….the flowers are dead in the corner…my eyes water all the time…i think i’m still going into work just because i figure i don’t care and it can’t get any worse…emily asked me some questions about the apartment today when i went to dropped off the homework in Tanshui…the guards want the money for March (fat chance they get that..hehehehe)and she said something about my chinese roommates needed to call about when the lease ends…i don’t care anymore…i think its gonna be ok. maybe she is suspicious…i hope it keeps her up at night…..i’ve taken care of the major things except keeping my bags somewhere. India may be off again because the taj mahal is fucking far from katmandu…maybe i’ll fly..or i’m thinking about going to angor wat in cambodia, but there is civil war..and its hard to cross overland….I spent all day yesterday running around taipei looking at travel books, and cameras…only to buy nothing, all sick, raining….i drank some Starbucks and i think it threw my brain into delirium…i was walking around reminiscing about when i first got here…fuck…..i’ve been here too long..

Man….those were the days…sort of. I was very sick, but somehow I’d worked myself up into a mad pulse of energy….sickness be damned. I had my eye on the goal: Escape. Like the Millenium Falcon from the exploding Death Star.

Fast forward about two years and I wrote this email from Spain. This one is a little different. I not only remember it, but reading the words now makes me remember how I felt, where I wrote it, the day, and what happened after I left.

What an incredibly brief and wonderful focal point this was. It takes the sum of a person’s life to occasionally make one feel that at that moment you are better at being you that you’ve ever been before.

my life just changed again forever…i love it…its quite a long story, i´ll tell you when i get home, but this place has been every bit as good as groningen as far as just having fun, and the life and mood, of course everything from now till forever will far short of holland as far as personal growth and just being at that age, but all the people here are at the age we were then and i saw it happening, the way it is changing their lives, the way they will always remember salamanca, its a beautiful thing…i haven´t been this happy in…..a long time….i´m the funniest i´ve ever been…i laugh all day every day, and there are all these people that laugh with me…..i met a girl even…that is too long to give account of now, but for me to really like a girl after so so long just seeing them as the opposite sex suprised even me, i didn´t know i was still capable. Unfortunately i didn´t meet a friend like good ol´ Pete, but i feel blessed for what i have had. I made A´s and B´s in my
classes..which suprised me too, because i haven´t studied any, unless you count speaking bad spanish, wasted, to some girl at a club at 5 in the morning as practice. I got in at 7am last night, 8 the night
before….i´ve been partying like a rock star, and its been such fun. I´m going to shave my head and catch a bus to morocco tonight at midnight…me, the journal, a few books, and the thought that I´ve done the best i could here…I´m content…I´m younger than I´ve ever
been. For me to say I´ve been lucky is almost blasphemy because i know little of it has been luck, but I´ve been lucky still. Its so hard to recover from the time of your life. the years keep rolling
by, and there is so much for me to miss, because there has been so much for me to love.

elliott

It took only a few minutes to write that, but in a hundred tries and a year of revisions I’d never get even close to saying it again quite as perfectly.

My life has come together like that so well only a handful of times. It is the hope that one day I can revisit that feeling that wakes me in the morning.

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I always find it really interesting to go back and look at what I was thinking at a certain time. I wouldn’t guess anyone else would though.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2005 at 10:04 pm and is filed under Inside My Head. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.