Slanted Rays

The cover of the journal that I am excerpting in this blog post. I decorated this journal when I was nine years old, so it is not particularly artistic. The cover is cream-colored, with an fleur-de-lys print in lime green on it. The binding is an orangish-yellow. I have placed jewelled shooting star and flower stickers on it, along with stickers featuring platitudes like "True Friends" and "Live Laugh Love". There are two separate stickers with my name written, in different fonts, with the writing smudged. Nine-year-old Lydia was clearly not destined to go into Hello!  I am returning with another journal retrospective. Once again, I am sharing excerpts from a journal that I kept during my senior year of high school. Per usual, I am making occasional edits for anonymity, grammar, and accuracy, while keeping the content and character of these journal entries as they were originally written. At this point in my life, I was trying to journal d...

Image of trees and mountains from "the ridge" at Collins Lake Ranch My life has been a bit of a whirlwind lately. I spent the past month visiting my grandparents, working at Mountain Friends Camp , traveling back home, and recovering from camp while trying to fill my days with meaningful activities. We have reached the point of the year where I stay home while my family goes to school/work, and I can feel myself slipping into the role of house spouse/sad spinster whiling away the hours. Right before I left for New Mexico, I bought a Tarot of Pagan Cats mini-deck . I have gradually transformed into the vaguely-New-Age-pseudo-witch that my younger self would have resented, largely through a sequence of seemingly innocent purchase choices. When I left for study abroad, I left my two tarot decks back in California. However, I have since felt tarot's absence from my life, and I was happy to get back into the habit of pulling a tarot card every day and occasionally tryin...

This is a photograph that I took on-campus at Soka. The sky is lit up with a beautiful orange and yellow sunset. There are shadowed outlines of trees and mountains in the foreground. For today’s blog post, I thought it might be fun to look through some of my old journals. I picked up a journal from my senior year of high school and boy there is a lot of post-worthy content in this thing. As a deeply dysfunctional and slightly egotistical being, I was working on a fictionalized memoir. To my humiliation, later pages of this journal show that I was also adapting it into a play, complete with a staging diagram. As part of my research for this endeavor, I wrote out detailed quotes from my older journals, and I copied down several of my text conversations. I have kept everyone mentioned in these entries anonymous when writing this blog post. I have also, as much as possible, avoided telling stories that would make the people therein clearly identifiable. With ...