It is the end of the semester, a time when I totally lose it and drown a bit in the churn. Well, truthfully, I stay afloat (just, sometimes), but it’s rough.
I am sitting down to start up one of the far too many daunting projects I have ahead of me, and, as is my wont, I have a pen and looseleaf paper to take notes the old-fashioned way to kick-start my thinking. Questing for a lap-friendly hard surface, I found an old notepad shoved under a pile of papers and notes from last year. I pulled it out and started to flip through it out of curiosity. This is from my freshman year of college. It is from my freshman year of college.
My handwriting hasn’t changed. In some startling ways, my writing, period, hasn’t, either. The notepad is a weird, disordered mixture of first drafts of papers (poetry analysis, political philosophy, sociology, Roman history), notes about Middlebury Transit prices, quotes for Activities Board events, notes about exams, reminders about meetings, unsent letters to my boyfriend (“I honestly should be shipped off to the looney [sic] bin,” I wrote. “I certainly don’t belong in college!”), meditations on adolescent angst (“When do you stop mourning for something that is only gone in part?”), and, notably,
2 bags of lite cow salt
4 fly blocks
The notes end with the first couple weeks of my sophomore year and include both a class schedule and a graded paper (on “Elegiac Stanzas”; A). The letters to my boyfriend are particularly funny. Many things about me have changed, but at least my neuroses have remained stable over the years.
