lisamac.diaryland.com

I just saw my diaryland for the first time in years yesterday. Here 'tis for old schoolers: http://lisamac.diaryland.com/. It was funny to go back so many years in time and see what my life was like just out of college. What was important to me, where I THOUGHT I was going, what was happening in the world. All my pictures are gone because my paid account expired, but the words are there. I saw something in my old musings that I don't see in my current life.

I was more adventurous, I encountered so much more that I was able to write about. These days, when things happen to me, which I would argue, just as many extraordinary things happen to me in a day, I can't write about it because it's private, it's about my students, or it might be inappropriate. I miss my anonymity in that way.

On the otherhand, my disregard for privacy has brought me back into contact with many a long lost friend in recent years, and for that I appreciate the smallness of the world. My wedding photographer who was my sister's wedding photographer just rode to SFO from Thailand on the same plane as my brother-in-law. That's unrelated, but still, the world is small.

I subscribe to the NY Times online. "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere." NY, Manhattan, more specifically, might as well be Oz for me. I stayed there briefly two summers ago with my my best friend, Jeremy and his partner, RJ. I didn't "make it" there because I was merely living on my teacher's summer salary and credit cards and didn't have the stress of having to make it there. I spent at least two days of my stay locked inside their railway apartment with my face stuck to their air conditioner. On my first night, I fell down in the street drunk from drinking a few sips of a margarita. A LIFE in NY would be different. I fantasize about it, kick myself about never moving there, and it is becoming more and more the girlfriend that was too much that you loved but kicked out of the car because it was just easier and now she's getting "smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror," to quote Old 97s.

We have a 20 year deed on our house. I don't think I'll be moving to NY any time soon, but maybe it isn't that girl in the rear view mirror. Maybe it's the girl you've had a crush on for years, but haven't worked up the nerve to talk to.