Dear Diary

I’ve been skimming Kafka’s voluminous diary entries the last couple of days. It’s reassuring to find out that famous writers are as boring as everyone else as they relate the mundane events that fill their own lives. I’ve never kept a diary before, and by diary I mean a logbook of a diarist’s emotional and physical life, as written down and perceived by the diarist. I did keep a travel journal during college, which I used mostly to remember the places I’d been and quotes that seem to burst fourth while one’s abroad. But I don’t think my travel journals come close to the intimate minutia your average diarist trudges through as they try to make some sense of their life. Blogs can be like diary entries (a freaky public diary entry), but my blog really isn’t about me, per se, as it is about my perceptions of the world around me, as whacked out as they may be sometimes.

So, you may ask, what would a Blogagaard diary entry look like?

November 34^th, 2005

Woke up again. Still live in St. Paul basement studio apartment, thank god, and not Maple Grove. Took shower after waiting five painful minutes for water to warm up. Put on necktie of oppression, went to work at feeble local eye clinic. Spent day reassuring nervous white people and boisterous Somalis that everything was okay, that they would indeed get the eye spectacles that were right for them. Almost caught e-mailing or blogging at least six times by boss or co-workers. Drove home in the dark, wearing sunglasses because clear glasses forgotten in apartment. No messages. No mail, except for new issue of New Yorker to add to pile of other unread New Yorkers. Grilled pork chops on George Foreman grill, made sticky rice as side dish. Delicious yet again. Watched TV reruns to reassure myself humanity still existed outside apartment. Worked on novel. Pick a novel, any novel. Played computer football when novel became too overwhelming. Need to draft quicker, hard-hitting OLB for my team’s defense. Thought about reading a New Yorker, watched That 70’s Show instead and drank hot cocoa. Took hot bath in small tub. Returned to novel, invigorated by bath. Wrote until one or two A.M. Turned off lights and lay in bed, listening to music on headphones. Dreamed of a girl whom I’d known once but could not place. She was so happy to see me. We’d be perfect together. Woke up again.