A Preface

When I was seven years old I received my first diary from my mother. At thirteen, my best friend and I made a New Year's resolution to write in our diaries every day. This pact continued well into adulthood. From country to country, relationship to relationship, I've lugged around my big purple backpack full of diaries. I even keep it close to my front door so I can grab it and run in case of a natural disaster. What would I do if I lost my diaries? Of course everything that's happened is still there stuffed in the drawers of my brain, but even back when I was seven I had this idea that I was writing about my very average life with the purpose of someday sharing it with...somebody? Maybe that somebody would learn something. And then at some point I realized that my life was perhaps not so average.

Of course I'm not so stupid as to think I could keep twenty pounds of books around forever. Years ago I started filing them away on my computer. But as the boy-crazy me in the entries left pubescence and entered into the excruciating love of adulthood, it became too hard for me to read what I had written, and so half of my books remain in paper form.

Now I'm sitting Japanese-style on my cold wood floor, typing the first blog entry of my life on the first day of a new decade, and it follows a very content day. If I wasn't so content now, I don't think it would have occurred to me to revisit those diaries, much less make them public (and this about as public as you can get!). But I've had the name of this blog written in the back of my head for ten years, and it's time to get started. Someone might find it interesting. Someone might learn something.

Disclaimer: This blog is a work of non-fiction. Most personal names (except for those of celebrities) and place names have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.