Looking through one of my old journals this weekend, I was reminded of the essay prompt for my application to Cornell five years ago. It begins:

On rereading his personal journals in the last few years of his life, E.B. White, author, journalist, and Cornell graduate (1921) wrote: "Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. They are loaded with opinion, moral thoughts, quick evaluations, youthful hopes and cares and sorrows. Occasionally, they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy. That is why I have refrained from burning them."

For a long time I really did think I would end up burning my journals. It just seemed like such an appealing idea; a dramatic way to break with the past.

I remember the day, too, when I knew that this was the moment, that I had to do it then and be done with them. I couldn't do it. They were just paper, and they'd put up with me for so long that I felt indebted. The idea of burning them didn't seem grand and dramatic anymore.

My journal writing dropped off when I started blogging after high school, though for a while I tried to make time for both. From time to time, in Freiburg for example, I would find myself without a computer and take up journaling seriously again.

(The entries from both of my stays in Germany are in German, for the most part. Symptomatic of my devotion to the spectre of "total immersion." Needless to say, they took forever to write and I'm not sure I'll be able to read them in a few years, if I can even read them now.)

The journals I looked at this weekend were written in my senior year of high school, back when I wrote every day with few exceptions. I'd forgotten much about journaling that was immediately obvious: the way my usually miniscule handwriting got larger and sloppier right before I dozed off, and the letters I saved between the pages (many of them now hopelessly misplaced, I'm afraid).

Specifically, I wanted to look up September of 2000, around the time of our last high school Homecoming, in order to embellish on Graham's final, somewhat anticlimactic embarrassing story. There wasn't anything about that.

I mean, anything. Although in general the journal is a good record of daily events: I'd forgotten about things like the hubbub over our senior T-shirts, singing along to the radio with Henrik, and Meghan Thurlow's suppressed underage drinking pictures.

The line "Ah, finally, the satisfaction only proof that Thurlow is a phony can give" cracks me up every time I read it.

The memories don't come flooding back. I can't picture the T-shirt (presumably I still have it at home) or recall any gossipy conversations about Thurlow. Still, there's a satisfaction in having the facts, especially if I'm the one reporting them.

It's my experience that an overly nostalgic temperament can be a curse if you're trying to live in the present. The present (not to be confused with "the moment") is always the tricky part.

More than anything else, this journal, like all the rest, is a chronicle of emotions. Reading about all those frustrations and hopes and fears makes me feel disaffected.

And I am disaffected. Back then I could hate a half dozen people, deeply and truly, in the space of a month. Now there's maybe, what, one person I hate?

Distance and time seem to wipe hate away so easily. There was a time when I wouldn't accept that. I would keep hating, on principle if for no other reason. I'm probably better off now, I suppose.

(Part of me wonders if Patton Oswalt is right. Maybe, in a far more profound way than his joke ever intended, your life really does go better when you have an archnemesis.)

I don't know if I can even access the intensity of emotion I seem to have had back then. That was always my theory, too. That adults didn't realize, didn't remember, how strong the emotions of children and teenagers can be.

I also swore never to dismiss an opinion because of the age of the speaker, good advice for anyone. My dad had this idea that ignorance on all subjects decreases naturally as you age. Whereas I believed that just-living teaches you some good lessons, but nothing you should be able to win an argument with.

Reading the journal I can remember the dizzying emotional landscape of that September, even if the events themselves remain hazy. That's something.

I don't think I could ever actually sit down and read through my journals. Too embarrassing, too solipsistic (this from a diarist blogger), too repetitive. And then there's the nagging, illogical worry — the same feeling I get when I look back at some of my first blog posts — that my writing is constantly degenerating.

I used to worry that I would get amnesia, and forget everything about who I am, becoming a completely different person. The journals, so the plan went, would be there to bring me back.