If a cow ever got the chance...

So I have about an hour to write this before C comes over. We're going to the world's best restaurant, Udupi Palace, and then I have to go to Patel Brothers, which is practically across the street, so I can buy some curry leaves so I can make curry powder so I can make my favorite curried carrots with banana and raisin. It sounds nasty but isn't.

Yeah, I took a sick day today. It was the hideously expired orange juice... well, that and the fact that I had nothing to do at work today except continue to catalogue the bodybuilder photos and I don't have to get those to the Image Scanning Specialist until next Monday. So why not sleep until 11 a.m. instead of getting up at 5:45 so I can be on the train by 7 and at work by 8?

I have been thinking a lot about the purpose of this journal. I don't want it to be just a recitation of my day, because that would get old. It's actually sort of rare that I leave my house for a non- work-or-grocery- related purpose. Then there is the C problem--he doesn't even know I have this diary, and I think he would be pissed if he read it--especially some of the earlier entries. So I haven't told him about it, but that feels really strange, since we tell each other so much. He knows I am a big slut and that I want to find a delicious vegan boyfriend with piercings, for example... He also knows I'm not entirely kidding when I say that. What's different about this diary is that there are personal things about him, and it's for public consumption... He's pretty secretive except with me and he'd view it as a betrayal of trust. So I don't really know what to do. The odds are pretty good that he'll find it on his own eventually, or at least become curious as to why I keep erasing the history on his computer...

I have become very attached to writing in this thing in a very short span of time. I think it's healthy for me. Like vitamins or (shudder) exercise. See, I used to be a writer, in high school and college. A pretty fine one, actually. At first it was nonfiction, then poetry, then I met Outgrabe and it was fatal. I was a freshman, he was a senior, majoring in Creative Writing, and he was so fucking good you just wouldn't believe it. He was way beyond me in his poetic development, but not so far ahead that I couldn't learn from him and someday hope to be that brilliant myself. (Yes, Outgrabe, I am aware that this was not entirely justified; keep in mind that I was 18 at the time and that all my friends were math majors. That was the problem--it was this advanced case of hero worship and emulation that continued even after our romantic relationship crashed and burned in like a month and a half. I even continued to send him poems, but since they were about the aforementioned crashing and burning, they weren't very good... Eventually we stopped speaking for about three years, but he had already become the censor in my head--every time I wrote something I liked, I would try to figure out if Outgrabe would like it, and if the answer was no I would scrap it right there. And since we don't have the same poetic voice, this meant I was producing a lot of very pale imitation-Outgrabe. Eventually, my senior year, I had a great creative writing teacher who was able to undo some of the damage, but pretty soon I started to write for him, not because he wanted this, but because I tend to suck up to people I consider authority figures...

The instant I graduated from college, I stopped writing. Not just poetry, I quit writing anything. And it wasn't sad, even though I'd had so much invested in it for ten years; it was actually a relief to be able to stop twisting my words around for other people. Later, I did feel sad about it, but by that time I didn't know how to begin again.

So that's really what I want this diary to be. An attempt to understand what my real voice is and how I can get it back. In practice, this is going to look just like an ordinary diary, but at least it's writing. Maybe later I will post some poems, older ones.

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