Today I went through a couple of my 1994-1995 journals, looking for some info I may have written about my jobs at the time: housecleaning and working in a college textbook warehouse. I do remember most of what that was like, and was thinking of mining some of it for the novel since that was fairly interesting low-wage work for me at the time.
But I barely even mentioned it in my journal. Nothing about the house in Albany that was coated from wall to wall in the hair of two golden retrievers. Nothing about the huge mansions where I washed windows and made beds, mopped wood floors, cleaned mirrors with vinegar. Not a word about the huge place in the Oakland hills with rust-orange carpets matted with sticky white cat hair, a bedroom floor covered with books, a kitchen sink full of moldy dishes. Or the Chinese temple in Berkeley where the kitchen tiles wore a thin coat of stubborn chicken fat.
As for the warehouse job, I remember lugging heavy boxes of hardcover books, and my lean arms developing incredible muscle tone. I remember sickeningly strong coffee that sometimes had a less-than-desired effect on my guts. I remember breaking into the adjacent warehouse with my pals, where we found endless crumbling boxes of fifty-year-old greeting cards and other weird antiques. Listening to the OJ Simpson trial on the radio as I shelved psychology textbooks. Every once in awhile, standing on a tall ladder with one of the books open, reading a page or two.
None of this made it into my journal, which I wrote in at least once a week.
I wrote about boys. Crushes. Few of which ever amounted to much, none of which amounted to a real relationship. Good lord. I paged through my notebooks today and goddammit, it was all about being sad and lonely and feeling painfully shy and unattractive. Which of course I was not. I had plenty of friends, and I was cute, if I do say so myself (see icon). But I never saw myself that way. Not for a long time.
I didn’t get a boyfriend in the Bay Area until I stepped outside of my little punk rock scene and started dating a guy I met at a movie theater in downtown Berkeley.
Anyway. Lots of drama.
It was very nice to read my first entry about my cat Simon though, whom I picked up from his mother’s house on 7/29/94. And I saved the classified ad too. “Adorable kittens. Free.”
As a person who saw you writing in your journals in high school, and got to see the stacks of them one sunny afternoon when we sat on your bed and talked for what must have been hours, I’m sure that all the stuff that is in those well-worn books is very, very interesting.
I wish I had the same dedication to writing that you’ve kept. I eventually threw my journals away, some time in 93 or so, because my girlfriend read all of them, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that happening again. So now they moulder in a landfill somewhere.
I still have those high school journals too, but I never, ever read them.