And then I went again. And am continually wanting to go again. I wore a bathing suit under my clothes yesterday in futile hope that I could.

I went down to the creek the other day, feeling like it was summer.

Some (un)related words I consumed this morning before getting down to work (which operation still pending)

"You better watch yourself. You can't relax in this life for one minute."
(the guy sitting next to me talking about tripping and hurting yourself)

It must follow that every history of the book - subject as books are to typographic and material change - must be a history of misreadings. This is not so strange as it might sound. Every society rewrites its past, every reader rewrites its texts, and, if they have any continuing life at all, at some point every printer redesigns them.                                           (D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the sociology of texts)

Why do I write my blog in this particular way? Because everything is personal? Because I take everything personally? There are lots of people out there blogging as a part of their "professional" life, separating things, cordoning off. Which I suppose I'm doing too in the opposite direction. It seems somehow safer to write about my fears, addictions, and mental stumbling blocks, than to tell you what I do for a living or what I did today. One's as much a process of image-control as the other. I guess I'm just questioning what this blog is about, which is to ask, as usual - am I working hard enough? Something I've been turning around in my mind in recent months is how to distinguish the things I'm serious about from the things I'm just doing for fun. There are very few of the latter because I doubt that I've ever half-assed anything in my life. I either do very well or refuse to do it at all, which is a pretty damaging model in the long run. Not that I shouldn't enjoy the things I'm also serious about, but I don't have to be serious about the fun things. I've yet to make clear which ones are which, though. And now that I've become so serious about trying to have fun, maybe I've screwed my chances once and for all...

Why is it hard to read things I wrote so long ago? I hang on to the notion that I am someone else just as much as - maybe because of? - my fear that I'll be lost in the succession of past selves dying in time.

Something I have thought - I remember - and probably wrote down - is that I am more like my past and future selves than anyone else, so that's the closest I'll get to anyone and the best understanding I'll have of anyone.

It seems strangely unlikely now though. Maybe because that silly past-me character is the one who thought it.

Another great and rough week this time around.

Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.

-William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)
(via A.Word.A.Day, which I would recommend to anyone.)

 I've become so used to having people upset with me in the abstract and hypothetical realm of anxiety that having it happen in real life is... harder? easier?

I read through a little more of my (19 and counting) notebooks. At some point I made a list of life goals that leaned heavily towards the extreme sports.

A recent question I asked annoyingly during a movie: Does "coming of age" really exist, or do we just need that narrative to make us believe that it does in order to make sense of the discrepancy between past and present?

I have certainly changed, maybe in response to my environment or as a product of my age, maybe deterministically and maybe only in my head. Maybe the past and present exist simultaneously.

(screenshot I made on Monday from this: http://www.upworthy.com/if-you-think-old-people-arent-nearly-as-cool-as-young-people-then-you-havent-see)

more facts

I typically leave without directions to the place I am going, even if my understanding of how to get there is based on a few fuzzy memories of intersections.
I like maps but not usually in the context of using them to get somewhere.

It is share city around here today.

Talked to my dad last night about prosopography, advanced the hypothesis that we document other people because we want desperately to be remembered ourselves.

Feeling lonely, contemplating being even more lonely this summer when my person is gone. My childhood bedroom does this to me with. out. fail. I spent much of this morning and yesterday going through notebooks from my storied (apparently, given their size and number) youth. And by going through I mean glancing at and putting down like they burned me. I'm getting better at seeing the pictures of me from times I was embarrassed by them, but reading the things I wrote in middle and high school still hurts. Or would, I imagine, if I could do it.

My heart beat like crazy driving up to my childhood neighborhood today.