the living past

I stumbled across a veritable treasure-trove of Scott lore yesterday.  I now present to you may ancient blog from days of yore, my Xanga!

I stopped updating it in March of 2007, just as I left to study abroad for four months in Japan.  I decided, at that point, to move my blogging to my own website, Sliced Water, so that I would have greater control over its appearance, and also so I could better integrate it with the photos of my trip.  Xanga was great in some ways, and not so great in others (you'll notice, if you page through, that most of the photos haven't survived the years).

I didn't keep up with the blog in Japan very well; I was too busy eating amazing Japanese food.  I did take tons of pictures there, though, so I might start rerunning some of the classics on this blog.

If you do take the time to look through my Xanga, you'll see that in some ways I haven't changed a bit, but in others I am completely different.  Reading through it was a pretty shocking experience, because I can barely remember that time in my life.  It sort of comes back to me to read it, but it's been a while, and the novelty of my trip to Japan (and romance; I got engaged there, after all!), and subsequent complete misery of my senior year of college and three years of law school, served quite well to wipe out my memory of much of that time.

I'm saying that I'm on a voyage of rediscovery here, people.  That's a special thing.

Some of what I'm reading from past-me is hilarious, some is moving, and some is cringe-inducing, alternately for my immaturity, rudeness, or self-conscious intellectualism.  I won't apologize for the irrepressible arrogance, though; that's a work of comic genius.

I often worry that what we, as individuals, experience as "life" is merely a series of independent consciousness connected by strands of memory, each wrongly thinking that it's a direct continuation of the last one.  If all that carries forward when I go to sleep is my memory, and I'm fundamentally changed (albeit only a little) when I wake up by my experiences from they day before, then isn't going to sleep a form of death?

These kinds of thoughts actually cause me a great deal of anxiety from time to time, pointless though that might be.  I can remember having some semblance of this fear from as early as first grade, the fear that I would change so much by the time I was a grown-up that I wouldn't really be me anymore, and thus, wouldn't be alive.  That first-grade me feared death, and so do I.  Ironically, that doesn't make me feel any better.

What does make me feel better is looking back at this Xanga blog, and finding that some of the ideas I expressed in it, even the ones I don't remember, still resonate with me greatly.  Past-me is effectively reaching across time and activating my emotions, but I don't mind that -- if he still has the power to do it, that means he truly is a part of me.  He's more than a collection of my memories, and these are more than just memories of emotions.  It reassures me that sleep is not death.

What sturdy vehicles our hearts must be, to carry such feelings to us from across the oceans of time, unchanged.