PicoBlog

[A little bit of housekeeping: I’ll be turning on paid subscriptions in the next few weeks. If you’d like to pledge ahead of time, please do! If not, keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll make another announcement when we’re there.]

I just wrote a short essay on my history as a failed diarist/semi-successful Livejournaler over on my “About” page. You can check it out if you like, but I did want to draw the main feed’s attention to this gem—a scanned page of my childhood diary, complete with the redacted names of my childhood enemies.

I can’t decide if my favorite detail is the fact that I sign my full name, that I identify “horse/dolphin” as my favorite animal, that I have a favorite “eco setting,” or that there is not two days but rather one year and two days between the entries.

I have a very strange and fraught relationship with childhood documents like this; a mix, I think, of being a packrat, being exceptionally sentimental, and having a mother who was constantly threatening to throw away anything she thought I didn’t need. I managed to save this diary! And though it is a predictably humiliating text, it’s also sweet to see little Carmen practicing her listmaking so early. Like most people, I have always been myself.

ncG1vNJzZmibkae6prrMmqmimZ2WsKmtw6hlrK2SqMGir8pnmqilX6V8pbHAq2SkoaSpxg%3D%3D