Blogs, journals, notebooks, and sand

So, I have started a blog. I've basically told no one about it. It's not hit any search engines. No one knows it's here.

Writing anything here is a little like talking to myself while standing in a closet in an empty house. All echos and muffled, awkward silence. Speaking to no one. Explaining things to nobody.

Hello? Hello? Hello? is this thing on?

I remember when I was younger, around second or third grade, I heard someone talk about keeping a journal. Not a diary, a journal. It sounded so intellectual, so sophisticated. As soon as I got home, I rushed to my room, pulled out a notebook intended to hold class notes, and promptly started what I felt was a good approximation of a journal.

(Actually, come to think of it, that's a good depiction of most of what I do in life. A hopeful approximation what I think I am expected to do. No one really told me how I should do the things I do. I mean, who trains the trainer? I'm always, kinda faking it. Acting like a technical writer, then getting asked to do technical writing, then frantically doing the best I can and handing it in. No one seems to have caught on yet. Ha, and don't even get me started on dating. I have to wonder if the person on the other side of the table feels as if they accidentally ended up in a weird game of charades, "um you seem like you're trying to be a movie star, no a wild bird, a hysterical mental patient, no, no, no I think you are telling me you don't like me, no, no....")

Anyway, I found myself writing things that I thought should be in a journal. As if, someday, someone was going to unbury it and feel enlightened by my insightful observations. I wasn't sure I was doing it right, but I didn't give up. It seemed like a good thing to do, even if I wasn't quite on target, style-wise. But that's why, as time passed, I stopped calling it a journal--because I wasn't sure it was-- and just started calling it a notebook.

Mind you, I didn't realize that maybe I was doing it wrong and should give up. No, in true callahan fashion, I just kept doing what seemed right and forged ahead until someone stopped me. After a while, my journalistic writings took on a more personal tone. I had moved from writing for an audience who I wanted to give the impression I knew what I was doing, to writing in the notebook purely for the sake of writing in the notebook.

Mostly what I wrote about was how I felt about things. Kind of therapy (if there is a therapy where one talks to themselves in a closet in an empty house. I have a feeling, if that was a form of therapy, it would at least be one I could afford) really, or maybe a friend that I could talk to. Explain things to. Maybe, when I found someone who wanted to be my friend (yeah, lonely childhood. hard to be a shy, gawky (gangly plus awkward) geek in really, really rural kentucky/west virginia.) I could just give them my notebooks and save some time (unless they couldn't read. wouldn't that be awkward...).

Time passed. My notebooks piled up. Filled with minutiae of a kid's life. Weather, when I got up, what I learned that summer, who did what to whom, when big events happened and how I felt about it. I learned to use words in ways I didn't expect. I learned, accidentally, how to speak better, because I was practicing getting my thoughts in order on paper. Things were making more sense, both written, spoken and just experientially. I was growing as a person (well, inside, outside I stayed tiny). All recorded in my notebooks. I went to college, decided to be an english major (it was a cop out. I could've gone to a different school on a scholarship for computers, but I was afraid of math so I chickened out and decided to do something that I excelled in easily...ha ha ha, time such the joker), and lo and behold, was required to write journals.

Ha, I had had years, and years or practice. *This* I thought I could do.

But no. It turns out that I wasn't actually writing journals all those years. I was, in fact, filling notebooks.

Journals were meant, you see, to be read.

They were meant to be relevant to an audience. Not so filled with the rich tapestry of impressions generated inside my head, but instead, be about the immediate activities that filled life. The books I was reading for the course. The papers I was futilely writing. The deep, philisophical discussions I was supposed to be having. They wanted to know what I was thinking about them, their stuff, the shared experience. They wanted to know if I was *getting it*. Not if I felt fat, or thought someone was looking at me funny. No poignant, intimate stories about how I felt all alone at frat parties. Those uncomfortable silences I can so readily record because they fill my life. (Heck, I watch awkward moments like other people watch birds. Oh look there's one now.......)

They did not want some sad girl's diary. They wanted a journal. What I gave them was neither. Needless to say, I am sure, looking back, that my stuff was not what my professor(s) would call light reading. I wonder if they found it easier to read aloud, over wine, with friends and a fair bit of laughter.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, I *was* getting it. Getting it like a sponge. Lapping it up like a cat's first taste of warm milk. There was a world I was starving to see. Filled with journal writing intellectual sophisticates.

I sat in those hallowed halls, those historical landmarks, completely grateful to be there, with those people. I knew with an innocent, burning certainty that those people were going to be grand. Extraordinary. They were philosophers and poets, deep and thoughtful. They truly wrote journals as they were meant to be written. They got it. As if purpose bred, they prowled the campus, growing in the years into graduates worthy of the expense of their education. If they ended up settling down to lives of offices and school plays, it would in no way dilute their wonder. They did it.

And I knew, sitting there, groggy with lack of sleep in those early classes, that that was what to expect. For them. Meanwhile, as I recorded all these things and more, I waited to see if anyone would realize I was there. A writer of notebooks. Lacking the sophistication of my peers, unable to really be deep without self consciousness. Wondering at the conventionalness of it all, questioning my place in it. I never felt like I was one of the entitled ones.

And I was right. I did get to write journals. I did read enough to see the error of my ways. By the middle of the first semester, I was writing approximations of journals with the best of them. It was so close, few could tell the difference. People would actually ask to see my journal, to see what I thought of something I knew they expected me to write about. I spent hours crafting the stories they expected. I thought I was pretty good at it. Finally, finally, I was writing journals. I was getting it. I was one of them.

But, it was not to be.

My story is not that unique in this fact. I ran out of financial aide. Although there were things I could do, grants I could apply for, scholarships I qualified for, help of all kind, no one raised a voice to mention these options to me, and alone I knew nothing of them. Not my advisor, not my RA, not the financial aide officers, counselors, or any other adults on campus. And so I faded away, became a statistic and never became grand. My classmates did though, I am sure of it.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that I was a college dropout, working odd job--, factory work, waitressing, answering phones, I continued to keep notebooks. My writing became uninspired. Thin, humdrum, whiny drivel. I had grown used to an audience. I had forgotten how to talk to myself. Eventually, I stopped all together.

I did, however, carry all my old notebooks with me. Yes, from third grade on. Every one. I could reach back through time and remember what the weather was like in the summer of 1976, when I was in the marching band, playing my trumpet that was longer than my arm. I could remember the sound of crickets at the baseball field at night and the humid air hitting me like a wet bed sheet as I stood under the mosquito laden lights in little league. It was all there. My lonely childhood, filled with wonder, fear, and delight. All categorized, logical and explained. Mine to comfort me and keep my life in order. No matter where I moved, I managed to keep it with me while losing, piece by piece, practically everything else.

I had a roommate then that had had a lonely life like me, although in a different way. I had regaled her with stories of my time at college. Telling her about the people, their poems, their grace. It was so compelling that she got her church to finance her, and she left to go there one day. On that day I got a new roommate that she had found. A guy from that very same college who had given me problems in the past.

Soon after he moved in, his cat peed all over my carefully preserved box of notebooks. I did not notice right away, and by the time I did, they had been ruined, every one.

I have not written a notebook since. And to this day I feel bereft of my life in some way. I never got to be grand and probably spend most of my time approximating it anyway.

Maybe this will be my notebook. Even if no one else ever, ever reads it.

At least I bet this way what I write will be safe from cat pee.

-callahan