Personal History
This is going to be a quickie because it's approaching 11pm and I want to watch a documentary before bed. I also have lots of Aristotle commentary I am not going to have done by my 7pm seminar tomorrow night and I can't afford the luxury of being that distracted now and still justify not reading all night. Today has been an interesting day - most of it spent reading in the Memorial Library basement between my two classes and then furiously taking notes while Bordwell lectured us for three hours on Aristotle's
Poetics.
I spent this morning and yesterday however doing a slightly more engaging task. As of midnight, my Middlebury email account is officially no more. It was easy enough to forward the contents of the in-box to my Outlook archive, but I couldn't transport the sent-items en masse. There was a lot of crap in there and it's about time I cleaned it out, so this is not in all a bad thing. I spent the morning sifting through some 90 screens of sent emails collected from the past three years, forwarding the memorable and important ones to my new account. It was an emotional and eventful few years - scanning all the way back to my days at MoMA and my first impressions and experiences in New York. Lots of letters to Nathan and John while they were stationed over in Paris, little notes to Jack on school breaks and "I'll be at the library, come find me later" memos, carefully worded notes to boys I liked over the years (more than once making the naive and foolish assumption that human attraction is tied to sophisticated / poignant phrasing), and then just a steady stream of gray-stained correspondence with Katie, endless clever-witted exchanges with O'Shea, and then the periodic "overdue" email to Kenny and Kaia and other assorted pen pals from various paths in my life. My Auntie Jeanie once told me if she could have anything in the world, she'd want back the text of all of the letters she wrote in college. That regret always stuck with me and I couldn't bear to part with my own personal letters.
Although doing all of this brought on a natural case of nostalgia, it made me reexamine and sigh over some of the most precious things I've collected to date - these memories, these friends, and even these letters. I didn't read many of them over word for word (I never would have gotten through them in time), but I will say that scanning them brought back floods of memories and reminded me of so many of the things I had forgotten. If nothing else, they contextualize most of college - put events back into chronological order and help remind me of the tone / feeling around different semesters, or, they chart the arc and evolution of a friendship while documenting the phasing out of another. I still feel torn up about losing that account and having to forward my mail elsewhere. I am a sentimental sap and I am not afraid to admit it. I still might not know why I hold onto these things, or old post cards, or letters or even thousands upon thousands of handwritten pages in my journals (dating back to the 4th grade) but I guess I am just this prolific mess of a person who somehow documents, explains, justifies, and enriches my daily experiences by meticulously recording it and writing it all down. Seeing all of this written out before me, I shouldn't be surprise that I've worn out two laptop keyboards and when I come down with carpal tunnel, it'll just be an occupational hazard.
Even now I've gushed too long and too much without popping
Sans Soleil into the VCR, but I came across an email I wrote to John and Katie the night of Spring graduation (May 2002) when so many of my friends were getting ready to don the cap and gown and I was just a spectator. Honestly, I hadn't thought much about this email aside from sending it - and had forgotten the stanza (and honestly don't remember the rest of the poem) - but these lines seem elegantly appropriate for a day when I spent so much time remembering the comforts and the past from a very new and distant kind of place. Like so many other times I look for understanding in poetry (at least in the last two years) it is a Frank O'Hara poem, and even the title is a romantic elegy -- "To Grace, After a Party": (the last stanza)
And someone you love enters the room
And says wouldn't
You like the eggs a little
Different today?
And when they arrive they are
Just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
Is holding.
posted by lmjasinski at 11:29 PM
