Angst and pizza: a blast from the past
I just reread some of a diary I kept one summer in my late adolescence. It charted every aspect of my then-romance in excruciating detail. And it's full of names of my fellow students, many of whom I don't remember. (Paul who?) Also, it proves I ate a LOT of pizza back then. It's practically the only food I mention.
But there are a few interesting little details about the chemistry course I was taking at the time: "My fingers are stained orange from the stuff we worked with [in lab]." "Today [our teacher] laughed quite horribly at the comment, 'Boiling NaOH would dissolve your entire body, except for the cholesterol.'" "[A fellow student] went around asking everyone their exam scores so he could figure out the class average."
I tried several times to write a short story about that summer, but it never worked. Part of the reason was that it was such a difficult summer, it was hard to get the kind of distance and perspective that would have helped me. Now I have so much distance that I've forgotten many of the details. I do remember that we only had about two fume hoods for the entire class. And that I loved working with the light-bulb-shaped* separatory funnels, even though our instructor told us how he'd once seen a student get sprayed with acid from an improperly vented sep funnel. And that there was one day where badly-written lab instructions caused all of our experiments to go up in (literal) flames. Little did I know that adult me would be far more interested in remembering these classroom details than in the minute dissection of my romance, but I wrote my diary out of my needs at the time. This journal is further proof--as if I needed any--that the child and teen years are not necessarily the best of our lives.**
There are also a few lines that make me chuckle, like the one where I wondered if I could ever make it as a writer. I don't know what I would have considered "making it," but it's one of the few constants from that time in my life to this: I'm still writing.
*shaped like the light bulbs of the time, of course; not like the curly compact fluorescents we have now
**although I wouldn't mind being able to eat that much pizza again
But there are a few interesting little details about the chemistry course I was taking at the time: "My fingers are stained orange from the stuff we worked with [in lab]." "Today [our teacher] laughed quite horribly at the comment, 'Boiling NaOH would dissolve your entire body, except for the cholesterol.'" "[A fellow student] went around asking everyone their exam scores so he could figure out the class average."
I tried several times to write a short story about that summer, but it never worked. Part of the reason was that it was such a difficult summer, it was hard to get the kind of distance and perspective that would have helped me. Now I have so much distance that I've forgotten many of the details. I do remember that we only had about two fume hoods for the entire class. And that I loved working with the light-bulb-shaped* separatory funnels, even though our instructor told us how he'd once seen a student get sprayed with acid from an improperly vented sep funnel. And that there was one day where badly-written lab instructions caused all of our experiments to go up in (literal) flames. Little did I know that adult me would be far more interested in remembering these classroom details than in the minute dissection of my romance, but I wrote my diary out of my needs at the time. This journal is further proof--as if I needed any--that the child and teen years are not necessarily the best of our lives.**
There are also a few lines that make me chuckle, like the one where I wondered if I could ever make it as a writer. I don't know what I would have considered "making it," but it's one of the few constants from that time in my life to this: I'm still writing.
*shaped like the light bulbs of the time, of course; not like the curly compact fluorescents we have now
**although I wouldn't mind being able to eat that much pizza again
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