I made this blog tonight. Do I like blogging about me? Do I miss that? I have a physical journal but I always put off writing in that. It gets harder the more you have it. My summer of 2006 is perfectly chronicled in that but this summer isn't. There's intermittent entries and then those summary entires when you attempt to discuss a period of several months in a single page... those never work. I had a livejournal. I still do I guess...I never deleted it. Its kind of embarrassing. Some entries don't even sound like me at all. I was in a different place then. It's very high school. I cut that out in Summer of 2006... I never even achieved closure with it. An entry of June 2006 just sits there, proceeded by an entry where I express how I feel like I've abandoned my livejournal. Yeah- I just brought it up. June 7th 2007, which follows a June 2nd entry where I write a sentence long note addressed to "livejournal" saying that I'm sorry to have ignored it. Then the entry before that is from February.

I'm not sure how I feel about the act of recording and keeping track of time and memories. It depends really. Sometimes its fun to look back and say, hey...I remember that. Other times like I said before, it's embarrassing. Like, ewww- I sound like such an emo. I'd like to think we remember what's truly significant in our heads, but as humans we don't keep it to the essential. Nooo, throw on 5 meat patties... we love excess. The car can't just smash after it drives off the 100 foot cliff- it must explode! We like mundane memories. There's importance in the mundane though. Everything we do is mundane and what we do is how we often describe ourselves and interact with people and etc etc. What isn't mundane and when do we realize it isn't? The first memory of my life is a surprisingly early one: I was 16 months old and was in Ohio. My cousin Hannah, just a couple of months old was in this weird baby device. Not a cradle, not a swing, not those bungee "let your baby bounce!" chairs. It was a slowly moving, rocking enabled but additionally baby powered imprisoning tool. I've seen pictures of the scene but my memory is full motion. Video couldn't of influenced it either...there's none of this situation I recall. So when I play out what I remember, it couldn't have been any longer than 10 seconds in reality, perhaps only 5. The setting was Thanksgiving. I think it was my first trip to Ohio, which also was accordingly my first plane ride. That memory was lost on me, but I heard I was a very pleasant passenger and received a complementary wing-pin for my non-irritating behavior. Actually that may have been another flight...who knows? Well, my parents do, but I'm not calling them up and saying "Hey...when was the time that I got that wing-pin?"Minor detail. Well, Thanksgiving diner just happened and like all kids I needed to escape from the table before the adults were finished. I was on the floor and headed over to my new cousin and began to push the rocking device than enclosed her. There was no escape, believe me. I was in full control. My memory doesn't include how many times I pushed, if I changed my momentum or how long I had been pushing. How did I even know how to push? (That's something for my Psych of Learning course.) Well I pushed, my Aunt Mary turned around, said to me "Don't push so hard Matthew." I then immediately stopped. Fade out. That's the memory. A push, a word, move out.

So my point with this... is this anything more than mundane? It's just a cause and effect act that is prevalent in our daily lives. I did something that unsettled someone else and they made that known. As a child I was always uncomfortable with being told what I was doing was wrong. In Kindergarten during a coloring section I would rotate the paper to better be able to reach certain areas. The teacher one day put her hands on my paper, steadying it, saying softly but firmly, "Keep your paper still." Well Mrs. D, guess what I still do to this day when I'm drawing and need to make something symmetrical? You've guessed it! I'm digressing though... That situation being my first memory is what's significant here, not the situation itself. So are all the memories that emerge when we trigger our brains to recall them the greatest hits of our lives? Is there something in each and every one of those situations that made the dark and mysterious realm of our unconsciousness think, "Nice, I'm totally making a copy of this one?" Right now I can recall six memories from my pre-school experience: 1) A kid who would always drink the tiny 4 oz boxes of an all-natural juice (but it wasn't Juicy Juice, but some other brand that had a white package.) Edit: Apple & Eve! 2) Racing big-wheels on the pavement and colliding with my neighbor Jonathan, badly scraping up my knee. 3) My best friend Ellen saying under a jungle-gym after some sort of fight that she wasn't talking to me again. (That changed later that day.) 4) Losing my first tooth and not having any idea what to do, so I put it in my winter hat and carried on with my day. 5) Playing with a giant parachute during gym and 6) Riding home after graduating and receiving a mini-Pound Puppy that when you squeeze its stomach its mouth opens, allowing it to grip to various objects. Some of those are perfectly sound memories, a fair mix of pleasure and trauma. But #1...does my mind occasionally just want to fuck with me and throw in some ridiculous arbitrary affair? Because, if it does...it's working.