I finally got a look at my 7" collection. It is considerably more valuable than the LPs I have. Especially given that almost everything contained therein is out of print, first edition, and by bands like Nirvana and Green Day and Rancid and AFI and so on. The great thing is that it's almost entirely composed of songs I love and many of the records have special little memories attached.

I really need to own a turntable again. That is going to be a priority.

Tags: music, punk

Today I went through a couple of my 1994-1995 journals, looking for some info I may have written about my jobs at the time: housecleaning and working in a college textbook warehouse. I do remember most of what that was like, and was thinking of mining some of it for the novel since that was fairly interesting low-wage work for me at the time.

But I barely even mentioned it in my journal. Nothing about the house in Albany that was coated from wall to wall in the hair of two golden retrievers. Nothing about the huge mansions where I washed windows and made beds, mopped wood floors, cleaned mirrors with vinegar. Not a word about the huge place in the Oakland hills with rust-orange carpets matted with sticky white cat hair, a bedroom floor covered with books, a kitchen sink full of moldy dishes. Or the Chinese temple in Berkeley where the kitchen tiles wore a thin coat of stubborn chicken fat.

As for the warehouse job, I remember lugging heavy boxes of hardcover books, and my lean arms developing incredible muscle tone. I remember sickeningly strong coffee that sometimes had a less-than-desired effect on my guts. I remember breaking into the adjacent warehouse with my pals, where we found endless crumbling boxes of fifty-year-old greeting cards and other weird antiques. Listening to the OJ Simpson trial on the radio as I shelved psychology textbooks. Every once in awhile, standing on a tall ladder with one of the books open, reading a page or two.

None of this made it into my journal, which I wrote in at least once a week.

I wrote about boys. Crushes. Few of which ever amounted to much, none of which amounted to a real relationship. Good lord. I paged through my notebooks today and goddammit, it was all about being sad and lonely and feeling painfully shy and unattractive. Which of course I was not. I had plenty of friends, and I was cute, if I do say so myself (see icon). But I never saw myself that way. Not for a long time.

I didn't get a boyfriend in the Bay Area until I stepped outside of my little punk rock scene and started dating a guy I met at a movie theater in downtown Berkeley.

Anyway. Lots of drama.

It was very nice to read my first entry about my cat Simon though, whom I picked up from his mother's house on 7/29/94. And I saved the classified ad too. "Adorable kittens. Free."

Tags: book, punk

I skimmed my journal from 19 this morning. I could barely even read it. I literally looked away from some of it, quickly turning the page over. I thought to myself as I read my own handwriting, "no, don't do that! NOOO!!!" But oh yes, I did it. I did all of that.

I seem to have so many regrets about my life back then, things I wish I had done so differently. Do not call that boy, do not ask him out (still the worst date of my entire life, ended with a limp handshake, and I still wouldn't get over him). Please relax Jane, just be yourself. Do not worry what they think. They are just like you. They are not as cool as you think they are.

But I was so shy, I was cripplingly shy. I was paralyzed. I would sit there in the Smithfield Cafe every day, writing in this little notebook about what was going on around me, speculating, do they know my name? And then tearing myself to pieces. Merciless. I felt small and ugly and fake. This went on for a year.

But I really cared. I really cared about those people I knew, those people who barely remember me now. I rarely said a word. I didn't think anything I felt or thought was worth saying out loud.

I wonder where it all came from. I guess I can chalk it up to my loneliness as a girl, feeling different and alienated because I was smart and naive and shy. Nothing really changed when I went to college, except my hormones kicked into high gear. I had a different crush every month, but I dated no one, I got close to no one, I kissed no one until summer's end, and he was just passing through town. When a guy actually did pursue me, I ran as fast as I could in the other direction. It was so much safer to obsess over someone I would never have, or choose a long-distance "boyfriend," than to find out what a real relationship was.

I didn't find myself until I came here. And when I came here, the first thing I found was a punk scene full of genuinely nice people, people who embraced me and smiled at me. Or was it just that I was 21 and had done some growing up by then? Maybe both.

I lived in Olympia for twenty-seven months, and it haunts me to this day.

Tags: olympia, punk