going back to see

I went back using tags on my LJ to see if I had recorded names (my physical journals are still boxed and inaccessible) and ended up reading through some of my entries. I usually avoid this. Someday I will write things and not be embarrassed to look at them again - fiction is especially bad. My old fic is still available, it even gets comments once in a blue moon, but I can't look. Even though I probably should remove some of the notes on it, and maybe see if the site has messed up my formatting - nope. I can't do it.

My journal entries of two years ago were okay, even if they were publicly posted and I usually get embarrassment squick from public entries more than anything. If I wrote about CLACSTC's flight line today, I'd probably borrow some of that phrasing.

I really miss my physical journals, actually, especially the entries I made of exceptional events (that is to say, not the entries written during say school, or routine events.) When I went to summer camp for the first time, I wrote nothing. The second time, I wrote one page about arriving, and the chaos of it all; looking back later, I was incredibly frustrated, because a lot of things happened in three weeks and I had recorded nothing. The one entry about arriving was tantalizing but there was no follow up. Time was a problem - I was doing things with the flight all day, then doing homework or working on my uniform during my off-hours, and then lights out was pretty early - but I was bitterly disappointed nothing had been properly recorded.

The third time I went to summer camp, I brought my new, nice journal and was determined to write things down. And I did. I had to sit in the bathroom (they were ensuite) most nights, because the patrolling staff could see the lights in the room, but not the lights in the bathroom, after lights-out. I would write really fast because lights-out was eleven, but we had to get up at five or five-thirty just to get ready, despite our regulated wake-up timing being six o'clock*. I do have records for those six weeks, but, as I said - they're still in boxes, and I hope they aren't mildewed yet.

I keep straying from the point. I'm not sure that journal writing is cathartic or anything for me, but it leaves a trail behind me, which is what I want. My parents made me write a journal from the age of five or six, and they're full of strange things I haven't thought about in a long time. In the beginning, when I was in French immersion they had things like "elle regarde l'oiseau" and then English printed below it, with illustrations. Other parts are repetitive and "I went swimming today" repeated on different days, because I went swimming that day and evidently couldn't think of anything else to say. They are very tame because they were read, but it's fascinating to go back and immerse myself in who-I-was. At some point I got tired of trying to find things to say and started a serialized story about my stuffed animals.

I give up. Despite wanting this to have a cohesive point, I've managed to go off on tangents anyway. *posts*

*(I see waking up at five-thirty as a blessing, because technically we were not allowed to get up before six - the boys, quartered in the barracks, weren't allowed out of their beds til six exactly - but the amount of things we had to do in the morning was ridiculous. I mean, be outside in C-4 with room tidied and bed made within 20 minutes? Scratch that, ten minutes, because we had to be early by ten minutes? Are you kidding me?

To be fair, I think they were mandated to have us sleep for seven hours minimum, but it was still ridiculous.)