Journal #35, May 2011-Present (age 21)

And so we’ve reached the present. Awkward. I’m actually almost done with this one, like ten pages left. I originally didn’t plan to decorate it to see if I could move towards being a person that could resist the temptation of writing lyrics on things, but in the end I put words on the spine. It would be nice to possess a single ounce of creativity or artistic ability. 

So, in this one…I took the last two exams I would ever take, freeing myself from all academic obligations, my brother graduated high school and I had a nice time there with my friends as well, I went to Ireland and saw Coldplay and The Strokes in the same weekend with Jo and Craig and my friend Lauren which was so perfect that I dissolved into a pile of musical adoration for awhile, I graduated university after itching to get out for 3.5 straight years, I moved back to the US for good, I broke my foot and have been in a cast for two months, and I’ve failed to do anything with my life yet and don’t feel too too bad about it at all for now. 

Journal #34, March-May 2011 (age 21)

I actually made the cover of this when I was 16, with slightly-wrong lyrics to “Ize Of The World.” I found it at the beginning of this year and figured I had to use it. It says “follow this feeling like you’re following light” in ransom-note-style letters, even though the actual lines are “[your body] followed this feeling like following light.” Oh well, I didn’t own a physical format of FIOE until mid-2007, so even though I know the proper lyrics now, a lot of them still come out as wrong when I’m not paying attention. 

So: Angles anticipation, Angles release, Angles skepticism. I was concerned at first that I didn’t totally love the album I’d been waiting half a decade for. It was definitely a grower, and still is, even though I never disliked it, either. 

There’s not that much university whining in this one because it was my last semester ever and I knew whatever happened, I’d be out and free soon. I finished all my academic obligations (besides two small exams, which would be in mid-May) for good in the first week of April.

I decided to go to the Oxegen Festival in Ireland when it came out that The Strokes and Coldplay would be playing THE SAME STAGE on THE SAME DAY. Of course, it turned out that my luck was too good to be true and The Strokes would change the day that they were playing to the Friday and breaking the most perfect lineup ever, but in the end (not in this journal), that worked out for the best. 

I wrote next to nothing about Coachella and my trip to California because I had no time and don’t usually write huge retrospectives—I leave that to blogging. But yeah, that was one of the best weekends of my life, despite RISKING my life to see The Strokes upclose. Sweetlife, however, was a vast improvement in the Strokes department, and I got to meet Janie and Bria and Hiba and Alix and Savera etc etc, which was half of why it was so great. 

Journal #33, November 2010-February 2011 (age 21)

Like I’ve said, I possess no artistic skill whatsoever, so I stick to putting lyrics on things. This will forever be relevant to my feelings about being an expat. 

This one is full of exciting things happening, actually. My house almost burned down, we got word of the fourth Strokes album actually being done and a real thing to hope for, I was in a Coldplay music video and met them twice, my face was in a teaser video on coldplay.com, my face was on British TV at a Coldplay gig on Christmas morning, I made the arrangements to go to the Coachella festival, UCOD was released and I loved it and still love it…all music-related stuff, but by now you should know where my priorities are. 

Between all the exciting things are huge gripes about university, of course, and grumbles about being an American and trying to survive in England after the shine has worn off. Despite the uni gripes, though, the classes I took the second semester were also pretty great: Constitutional law (which was hard, but fascinating), and Native American film and literature. I knew nothing about either of those things, which was great, because I felt like I wasn’t treading the same ground over and over like I had been for the previous two years. Still, despite me actually having motes of interest in the classes, I was over being Little Miss School and produced work that was on the top end of mediocre. I also did a lot of throwing of my Supreme Court cases textbook in frustration.

Journal #32, September-November 2010 (age 20)

I got more into writing this semester. It’s weird to reflect on such recent times. I went back to university and I liked The Strokes, that’s pretty much the bottom line. 

I really stopped caring so much about university, though, or stopped killing myself over it. Final years only take two classes at my university, though, so that was a major help from the previous semester, when I overloaded and took four so I could graduate early. One of my classes was about film in 1939, which was meh. But the other was about the current state of American affairs in the 21st century, starting with 9/11, and it was the best class I’ve ever taken. I guess I had my qualms about the technical things, like how we were spread a bit thin with readings and assignments, but the topics and discussions were great. I didn’t do shit for the film class, but the American Crisis class, I gladly worked my butt off for, writing my big final paper on Batman and terrorism. That’s how university should be. It’s a shame I only had one class in three years that I felt that way about.

The house that I lived in with three other girls seemed alright when we got it, but it slowly started falling apart around our ears, with walls leaking water and electric wires almost lighting the place on fire and broken appliances and mold and everything. It was a pit. I was also not so enamored with living abroad anymore. It’s weird when living in another country becomes routine and monotonous to you, and things like not owning a clothes dryer or only being able to buy enough groceries as you could carry on a 20-minute bus ride yourself are no longer quaint or excitingly foreign, they’re just a hassle. I did a lot of writing about America vs. England, and what it meant to be from somewhere vs. an immigrant.

Side note: I should have just bought about fifty of these journals in England and used them for the rest of my life, because they were only £4 and the best notebooks I’ve ever used. 

Journal #31, January-September 2010 (age 20)

I bought this one because the cover reminded me of the cover of A Hundred Million Suns, and I was in a major Snow Patrol phase. That’s also one of my favorite album covers ever.

So, this semester sucked. Academically, friends-wise…it wasn’t great. I hated my classes, I minorly screwed up a friendship that never got back on track (I still maintain it was a joint screw-up, though), and I was now aware that England wasn’t Shangri-La. My first semester was all honeymoon, but going back home for Christmas reminded me that I actually really like America too, and upon returning to England, I got more frustrated with the little things that I originally found cool and different. I think America and I just needed to take a break in our relationship and we were ready to get back together, but I wouldn’t permanently do that til August 2011.

I went to Ireland, France, Iceland, Germany, Greece, and various places in the UK. Most of these places, I went in the same cast I’m currently back in now. I was in Iceland for the first smallish eruption of Eyjafjallajokull, and then in Greece for the second, huge eruption that closed all European air traffic, and was stranded there for two solid weeks. I didn’t bring this journal with me to Greece, lest it be found by my travel-mates, but wrote two smaller, blue-book type notebooks while there that I have to dig up. 

Throughout that semester, I wrestled with the idea of whether or not I cared about university anymore. The answer was that yes, I did, because I felt bad about not working my hardest, but that it would be the last time I cared about uni—the following year was an exercise in almost complete apathy. But for this year, the junior year, I just winged my exams in a “fuck it, we’ll do it live!” fashion, which I’d never done anything like before. I felt terrible about it, to the point of an existential breakdown, but I didn’t study, I just walked in and took them, and the lowest thing I got was a B-. That was a far cry from the grades I was used to receiving, but I didn’t have it in me anymore to be little-miss-brownnoser when I wasn’t fundamentally interested in what I was studying. I decided that I was perfectly fine with doing fuck-all and getting Bs than working to the point of scratching all my skin off and getting As. It helped my mental health a lot.

I was back in the US for the summer, and I had a job—a real, big person, comfortable-salary job in an office, doing customer service for a biotech corporation. I hated it. I made a lot of money, but the project I was hired to run fell through, so basically I was paid moderately-big bucks for my age to be on YouTube all day. That sounds nice, especially when you have a parking space and a 401k at age 20, but really, it’s soul-sucking. I woke up at 5:30, got ready, commuted for 45mins to an hour, sat at a desk doing literally nothing all day, and then got home by 7 just to eat dinner and fall asleep in front of the TV by 9:30. Doing nothing and staring at a CRT computer screen all day plus driving a total of about 2 hours per day really wears you out. I didn’t even have time to write in journals, which is why this one took me so long to complete. I used to write cracked emails to myself at work all day, of weird life observations with a tinge of insanity (probably from all the free coffee I drank—I don’t mix well with caffeine). I also re-found The Strokes, this time for good, because of a combination of the London Venison gig (WHICH I MISSED AND AM STILL HEARTBROKEN ABOUT), and the fact that bellowing out the ragey lyrics to FIOE in my car every day to and from work was really therapeutic, as it was the only thing I did for myself besides sleep. Otherwise I was just pretending to look busy at work for the big bosses.  

Journal #30, August 2009-January 2010 (age 19-20)

This is all England, starting on my first night there. I was suddenly so busy that I didn’t write at all after that first night until late September, after I’d moved out of London (where I’d lived with a bunch of other Americans for a month) and to Norwich, where I’d live permanently. I did blog a lot, though, on a Blogspot blog I still have but haven’t written on in God knows how long. 

These journals are still so current that I feel weird tearing them apart like I did with a lot of the others. Basically, this one involves me whining about how the program I was on had so much work that it was basically not like being abroad at all, since we spent all of our time locked away in the library doing work for our American-run class, which we could have done in America, and didn’t have a lot of time for “authentic English experiences.” I didn’t have much time to travel that semester at all, but I saw several concerts in London, and I did go to Scotland on Halloween with American friends, which was one of the best weekends of my life. It was still the best weekend of my life despite the fact that I broke my foot climbing a mountain, but still had to walk on that broken foot until mid December.

I actually had friends and a social life, though. It was wonderful. I honestly liked the people I was with, and the format (a group of about 30 people, seeing each other day in and day out) was very familiar to me, given the way my lower school/middle school/high school was. I was comfortable that semester, or as comfortable as I ever would be at university, and it was great. I applied to permanently transfer to the English university I was studying at, despite having a hard time equating the quality of my education there to the education I got in America, simply because the systems are so different. I got in on Thanksgiving. 

And then there was living in England. There’s too much to say to put in one of these summary post things, but at that point, that first semester, I still loved it and thought I wanted to stay forever. I had a very long honeymoon period, but everything was really working out for me there those first few months. I got on much better with it than any of my other American friends there. 

The start of my second semester there was rough, and continued to be for the rest of the year, so the bottom line is that I had ONE semester in my 3-year-long university career that resembled anything good. The second semester, I took four classes as opposed to the usual 3, I disliked them all, and they were all on the same day in a row (classes at my uni only met one day a week, and all four were on Mondays). My best English friend started to distance herself from me, all of us Americans were more busy and didn’t have a ton of time to hang out anymore, and I started to get into deep, intellectual debates about the pros and cons of academia and higher education…which I still stand by.

Incidentally, this is my favorite journal cover I’ve ever had. My artistic skills are limited to putting favorite lyrics on things, but this one I actually made out of magazine findings as opposed to buying it like this. 

Journal #29, February-August 2009

I just…stopped writing so much around this point in my life. There wasn’t a ton going on. The volume never really picked up again until recently, because I’m making a conscious effort to keep it up, now that I completely realize how valuable doing something like this is. I actually made a resolution in this one that once I moved to England, I’d write everything down so I’d be able to remember it. In reality, I was too busy to do that. 

It was the tail end of my last year living in America permanently until now, and the last few months of my time at my first university. Then I had the summer, where I didn’t have a job because the economy was too rough to find one. I got into Phoenix (the band), I saw Coldplay at what might still be my favorite concert of theirs that I’ve been to, I went to Maine twice and Canada once (seeing Coldplay again at the last minute), made a lot of plans for England (like getting visas and all that). I had summer reading for the first time since high school, lots of it, but in the end it didn’t matter much whether we did it or not. It ends on the night before I moved to England.

Journal #29, September 2008-February 2009 (ages 18-19)

Lots of university whining. However, I made plans to make my jump to England, and I talked about that all the time, so there was something of a light at the end of the tunnel. I took a really great creative writing class in the first semester, and a good American Studies class, but Arabic was kicking my ass, and my film class made me finally completely sure I wasn’t cut out to work in film. For the first time ever, I started to verbalize exactly what I really wanted to do with my life, which was work for a band.

Again, there’s a lot of boy-related stuff in this one that’s making me cringe, because now I know how it all would end up and I still feel bad about it. I think I always will, if I still do 2-3 years later.

Coldplay premiered “Glass Of Water” in October with Albert Hammond Jr. and I just about had a heart attack in my Pennsylvania dorm room. I went to see Coldplay in New Jersey and had nosebleed seats, but Roadie #42 gave me seat upgrades to the front row, where I stole Gwyneth Paltrow’s seat. 

Barack Obama became president, which was a great, wonderful feeling at the time. Of course, feelings have changed country-wide since then, but I still admire him a lot, and I think he’s gotten a raw deal from the getgo. 

I started to run a Coldplay fan project with Lore, which saved me that semester. I worked more on that project than I did on my schoolwork, mostly because I needed a distraction from reality. The end result of that project, though, (which came in February) was one of the most concentrated feelings of joy in my life. 

Journal #27, June-September 2008 (age 18)

This one took me ages to fill mostly because it’s thicker than most of the notebooks I usually used and because I was working my butt off in Holland all summer and didn’t have a lot of time to write. Whole weeks of time are missed out, which is unfortunate, but it would start to become something of a trend later in 09-10 as well. 

The day before I left for Europe, though, I saw Coldplay on the Today Show from the VIP section at 6AM in NYC, and that night I saw Pearl Jam in CT, and the next day I moved to a country I’d never been to before. It was a bit of a whirlwind. 

The Netherlands was a great experience—I was an au pair for a slightly insane family of three kids, living in their house which they were actively renovating at the same time. I got so fed-up with the family I couldn’t see straight, and I also had a weird traveller’s sickness for the first two weeks and lost about 15 pounds, but it was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and really prepared me for moving to England the following year. I also visited London and France while there, by myself. It’s a very liberating thing, to travel to places you’ve never been completely by yourself. Everyone needs to do it. That said—don’t move to The Netherlands if you have a fear of bikes. 

Being a nanny, I got very interested in things like parenting techniques and child development, branching off of the things I had already been interested in from teaching kids at summer school for years. Even though I didn’t really grow up at home, and neither did many of my friends, I started to understand things about why I am the way I am versus other people who had the same school upbringing as I did, and it had to do with the sorts of parents I had. These parents that I worked for were appallingly strict with everything, and I saw the effects it had on the kids. They also sought out conflict at every turn and had gangbuster, door-slamming, screaming arguments all the time and then made up five minutes later. This was as foreign to me as the language and country I was living in. I was brought up with no restrictions on anything whatsoever, parent-wise, and was taught by my school to avoid open conflict and negativity about things of little consequence. This experience was like moving to Mars.

And then I went back to college for sophomore year and wrote long, dragged-out essays about why everything sucked and why college was so miserable for me. It somewhat helped to figure out the exact reasons, anyway.

Journal #26, March-June 2008 (age 18)

The cover of this one would take too long to explain. 

More university despairing, blah blah. I’d been greying since high school, but there was a marked increase in how fast my hair was lightening those days, which I think speaks volumes. I started to seriously consider transferring to film school, but in the end, I’m glad I didn’t. At the time, I think I was sure that I loved film enough to study it more seriously, but I also acknowledged the fact that I knew my strengths were in something more akin to management, and I thought it was telling that everything I wrote had to do with music. I only just started to admit to myself that that was the better choice for me.

Now we’re getting to the parts of the journals where things happened to me so recently that I feel I don’t have the proper amount of perspective on them yet. This journal involves…something that I’m still embarrassed about, involving…a guy, who in the end I wasn’t very nice to a few years down the line, and I still feel bad about that. Reading all the things about it when it was just starting is making me wince still. 

I saw my first 3D movie, there was a lot of Coldplay album excitement (the entire journal ends on the day Viva La Vida leaked and my thoughts about it all), I made plans to go see Coldplay on the Today Show in June (which I’m going to do again next month and am making plans for today, ironically), I went on a Strokes bender, I discovered Vampire Weekend, I met Barack Obama (for some reason this was in my memory as October 08? Wow, I was wrong), and on the same day, got a job offer in The Netherlands, which I ended up taking. 

I wasn’t a huge fan of “Violet Hill” when it came out, even though it grew on me, but I still remember the feeling of hearing “Viva La Vida” for the first time. All of the Coldplay buzz made the second half of that shitty semester so much better. It sounds so lame to say, but it’s true—I didn’t like what was going on in the real world around me, so I completely threw myself into the lead-up to that album. It helped a lot. As much as I’d always been obsessed with music, the way my life was in high school, I never had the time (or a fast-enough internet connection) to completely lose myself in current music events til then. I finally realized that music was what I wanted to work in for the rest of my life.

Journal #25, January-March 2008 (age 18)

This was the journal I started college in. It opens thirteen days before I went, saying that I was “somewhat irrationally afraid” that I’d burned myself out in high school academically and that I’ll have little patience for putting up with things I wasn’t wholly interested in at college. Yeah, I ended up hitting that nail right on the head. I did a lot of despairing before I even left, which all turned out to be exactly right. At this point in my life, I thought what I wanted to do was work in film, write screenplays, but in my secret heart of hearts, I knew I wanted to work in music, because that’s what I wrote most of my creative writing things about. I just still thought that was something silly to admit based on the way I’d been brought up.

EMI was in the toilet, which was threatening to affect the release of Coldplay’s 4th album and I went apeshit. I learned a lot about the ins and outs of the music industry in a short period of time to better understand what was going on. I think the threat of Coldplay striking and the research it inspired me to do was a big step down the road to my eventual confession that I really just wanted to work in music.

College seemed OK at first, then started to go downhill, both socially and academically. The girls on my floor were OK, but any weekend that wasn’t full of alcohol was a weekend wasted, and I wasn’t having any of that. They thought I was weird (justifiably) because I was so into things like music and film and they weren’t, and they told me I talked like a textbook, when using kind of elevated language in everyday speech was just something we did at my school. Classes mostly got me down because I didn’t care about the subject matter of any of them (besides astronomy), and they were easy to the point of being boring—except Russian history, that was more challenging, if as dry as toast. I felt a much stronger connection with my professors than I did with any kids I met.

Being around serious alcohol culture for the first time, I finally realized this:

God, I’m a pinhead. In “12:51,” he sings “we could go and get 40s.” I never understood before that a 40 is a unit of beer. Christ. Welcome to college.

I also found In Transit on YouTube for the first time and fell in love with it. I used to use it as fuel for laughing, which I wasn’t doing a lot of otherwise. I think that might be part of the reason I love it so much. 

A lot of the worries and initial thoughts I had about college, such as the fact that I wasn’t making friends and was trying to adjust to the idea that I might never make many real friends until I graduated, were shockingly right on. It’s actually a real downer, reading this stuff. Three weeks in and I was already fed up with academia and the social life and everything relating to where I was. I toyed with the idea that maybe my great high school experience doomed me into having a less-great college one by comparison, but I really think it just sucked from day one of its own accord. I wasn’t studying what I was interested in, and I wasn’t around anyone who understood anything I was interested in.

Journals #22, 23, and 24, November 2007-early January 2008 (age 18)

These are all really slim and come in a slipcover box thing. 

I went to NYC on my 18th birthday for a long weekend with friends—I had a good time, but I already noticed that my friends were becoming different people after two months in college and all they wanted to do was talk about their new social lives doing things that we wouldn’t have dared to do in high school. On the surface I had little going on, but that semester off was actually one of the best periods of my life because of all the things I was suddenly free to explore and learn about…and no one cared, or bothered to ask, even though it was my birthday. Except for that long-lost BF, who called me on my birthday and actually wanted to hear about my life. That was actually my favorite part of that whole NYC weekend, talking with him (and videochatting for the first time in my life! It was such a novelty then). For the first time, I described “On The Other Side” as fitting to how I felt. I’ve pretty much felt that way consistently since then, in a lot of ways.

We got high-speed internet in the beginning of #24. I had been living on a dial-up connection til December 2007, even though I’d been asking my dad for high-speed since 2005. I remember when I used to have to set aside an hour plus to download a song on iTunes, and wait til my dad wasn’t home hogging the phoneline. Even though it’s past me, it still burns me up that I used to have to get driven to the library to do anything more than mere surfing or downloading a song or two.

Even though I’d always been interested in England and always wanted to move there, I suddenly became obsessed with the idea in this time period. I talked about it a lot, like I knew it was going to happen soon.

Mostly blabber about Radiohead and Coldplay. Right before Christmas, when Chris wrote something on the official site about how much he loves Christmas music but can never seem to write a good enough Christmas song of his own, I gushed about how much I’d love to have an original Coldplay Christmas song. little did I know that three years later I’d be one of the first to hear an original Coldplay Christmas song, be in the video, and sing on a version of the track.

Journal #21, September-November 2007 (age 17)

The lyrics on the front are from an unknown song by The Fray that’s actually quite good. 

More nothingness going on. I passed my driver’s test, I worked, I wrote, I talked to my friends on the phone. Chunks of my hair fell out because of medicine I had to take when I got so sick in August. I thought a lot about Coldplay’s next album, even saying “I hope they don’t do any sort of uniform thing this time around, the all-black [in the X&Y era] was a bit much.” Yeah, lost out on that one there. In early November, Coldplay released this video on their website, which seems like just a lark…but leave it to Coldplayers to read more into it. As early as November 07, some of us figured out that Chris was spelling out “VIVA LA VIDA” with his hands, and that Will mouthed it at one point, so a lot of us were convinced that would be the title of LP4. The other half of the fandom thought that was ridiculous, so they sure as hell ate shit in March 08 when the title was announced. I was so excited by this conspiracy theory that I printed out the screencaps:

Also, Radiohead famously released In Rainbows and I had a religious experience and would completely crack out on them for the next six months. 

Journal #20, August-September 2007 (age 17)

More DCFC lyrics. I actually like the way this one looks in comparison to a lot of the others, which I find dorky in varying degrees, but this one strikes me as very hipster now. I don’t think that word (or concept) was in my vocabulary in 2007.

This opens with me failing my driver’s test. It was the first and only thing I’ve ever failed. I was still somewhat sick and had a fever, AND the tester tricked me by telling me to go down a one-way street, and when I started to turn down it, she said I failed. I still think that’s unfair—you’re supposed to do what they tell you to! My mom still had to drive me to work for another month and a half, even though I got my own car in mid-September.

All my friends started college whereas I had to wait a semester, so I talked about feeling like “the little sister left at home,” like Ginny in the first Harry Potter. I said, “never did I expect to be nowhere until 2011.” I didn’t want to go to college, but it was weird being left behind too. Ironically, I feel similarly now, exactly four years later—my friends have jobs or are continuing university, and I’m sitting on my ass with a broken leg. That’s obviously going to change sooner than January, but it’s interesting.

Besides working, I read a lot of books, watched a lot of House, and talked a lot about Coldplay’s fourth album, which we still knew nothing about at that point (but I hated the song titles). My friends called me a lot to keep me entertained, sometimes drunk, sometimes not. That definitely doesn’t happen anymore. 

This letter (a joint letter to four of my friends) is in the current journal I’m reading. I explained every song that I burned them on a mix CD. However, I got a bit confused on this one, because Julian shows up on “Scared” as opposed to “101.” I still thought it was cute.