The Academic as a child

Academic for lack of a better identifying term. Perhaps I should use pseudo-academic, or pseudo-bookstore employee. The Beer Aficionado? Bah!

Journals have had this crazy place in my life lately, whether it’s my reappearance here blogging, or with the fat diaries, or with my participation in 1000 journals popping back up. I emailed the last person to have the journal I participated in, and heard back that she’d sent it to someguy for a documentary. I checked the email I signed up for the project with, and sure enough I had an email from him about participating in the project, from way back in 2004, and another follow-up from this past July, asking me to identify some pages for a potential book project. Of the six pages he sent me, four were done by friends - two, including one that had the photo above, by an old family friend, and two others by a friend of mine from high school (one of the few I still talk to after all these years).

I saw the photo in the entry and, it brought me back, both to my experience with the journal, and to the time in the photo. My grandmother Eleanor, who died the year we were homeless, used to let me and Prisylla 9the other girl in the photo) play dress-up in her old dresses. She’s been gone for almost ten years now, and it’s been maybe seventeen or eighteen years since we paraded around in the awful, itchy dresses, but now in retrospect I see that as one of the most amazing times in my life, when I had family and stability and friends and absolutely no knowledge that that was pretty much the last time I’d be able to wear a dress without looking absurd. Which is not, of course, to say I wasn’t as much of a dyke then as I am now… I think then I just had more gumption.