When I was 17

Last weekend I had a hunt through some of my old notebooks and I found the journal I got as a birthday present from my friend Colleen when I turned 17. This journal details just over a year of my life. There are huge chunks left out. I didn't write about how I crashed my car that summer. I didn't write about our trip to England and Germany, I don't think I even took the journal with me on that vacation (I took about 30 cassette tapes and 5 books, but no journal that I can recall). There is a lot about the first boy I dated at the beginning of my senior year in high school. A lot about how I found out he was sleeping with a lot of other girls. Even more about the growing rift between my friends and I. Loads of crap poems and ideas for stories, and don't think I'm trying to be all charming and self effacing here. These poems were so damn bad. I'll take a picture of one at a later date so you can appreciate what a lousy poet I was when I was 17. I was better than I was at say 12, but good was a long way off. There's also a lot about the boy I met online when I was 18 who ended up being the first great breaker of my heart. It's almost painful to read the entries about him, no it is painful. It's hard to read through the optimism and amazement of first love knowing the results would be so devastating to my poor 18 year old head. Not that there's anything all that special about getting your heart broken at 18, but it was MY heart, so it's special to me.

In the middle of all the broken heartedness and introspection about friends and school and parents I found a funny little reflection about London and what I would be doing if I were back in the UK. 13 years later this entry strikes me as being really really funny. I forgot how enamoured with the Tube I was. The whole idea of people reading on the train struck me as being so romantic and wonderful. And, coming from the midwest, the whole idea of public transportation that was even a little bit reliable was pretty mind blowing as far as I was concerned. It took less than a year of living here for my love affair with the underground to die. Now, I avoid it at all costs. I take the bus whenever I can and the tube turns me into a raging hosebeast who hates all her fellow men, women, children, babies, and thoughts of future citizens to come. But it's good to remember that once upon a time, the tube was the best most wonderful thing in the world to me and that London was a dream I was scared to talk about out loud I wanted it so much.