Mining the Archive

As you can see from the time stamp on this, I am not sleeping much lately. In an effort to knock myself out, I pulled out an old journal in search of answers and/or remedies for the insomnia. Well, turns out I have always been an insomniac of sorts and the only thing that helps is to write down all the things that are rolling around in my head in the middle of the night. Some of the stuff in the journal is embarrassing and some of it reminds me of how far I have come (not as far as you think).

Anyway, I was reading a journal entry about working on Spell, the book of poems I wrote ten years ago (holy crap! ten years!), which got me thinking that ten years is a good round span of time and perhaps I should revisit the book, update it some and maybe try to show it to more than fifty of my closest friends. I opened up the file, re saved it as the ten year edition and wrote a draft of a "note from the author" type thing. That led to me wanting to take a look at my original notes for it...so there I am at two am in my Rudy's t-shirt (how appropriate) and pajama pants looking through old file boxes. Guess what I found. EVERY paper I wrote in college, drafts of EVERY poem I wrote between 1991 and 1998 (including ones I thought were lost forever to a time when zip drives were all the rage) and, AND the essay I wrote to get into my first choice college . I just re-read that essay and I can't believe I got into Sarah Lawrence College with something entitled Signature of the Dance. I know, I should cut myself some slack, I was only seventeen when I wrote it, but yikes.

The best part of finding all that stuff? I still have all the papers I had written for Clayton's class, with his notes attached. He gave great notes and reading them was a reminder that someone believed in me and my writing when even I didn't believe in me. Makes me smile and get teary all at once. I guess that makes the insomnia worthwhile.