Some thoughts I think to myself while reflecting on the last decade...

My whole life I have kept a journal. I say "a journal" -- but it's more like 30, or so, differently tattered, miscellaneous books, notebooks, pieces of paper stuffed in envelopes, that contain my daily, if somewhat repetitive, ruminations on my life.

I started my very first journal, an 80-page, Stuart Hall wide-rule notebook inscribed with awkward, cartoonish girly handwriting, in March 1995 when I was 13 years old. I think, at the time, it was meant to be a place to discuss my adolescent existential questioning of God, the universe, et al, brought on by a series of unfortunate events -- family tragedies, visits to concentration camps -- combined with the inevitable reading of the Diary of Anne Frank in my 8th grade lit class.

But, like most of my journals it contains an even mixture of self-deprecation and disdain for the world, longing for an impossibly romantic life I had yet to achieve, and what can only be described as fan fiction starring my crush of the moment.

There are a few advantages to keeping a journal, or many, namely that you have an exact record of where you are and what you are doing on various days of your life. Or it would be, if I had ever actually bothered writing down the details of my life, instead of simply using it as an undending soap box for indulging in vague, clunky, clause-overladen prose.

The handwriting has improved, that's encouraging.

At any rate, I am trying to formulate a summary retrospective of the last decade, based on my chicken-scratch journal entries, and struggling, partially because some journals have been hidden away -- in my parents' house, and elsewhere -- and partially because I never really write about my day in my journal.

I write what can only be described as "things I think to myself while driving in my car" -- or while riding the subway, or sitting in parks, or wiling away hours at temp jobs and retail establishments, or most often, while sitting on my bed in the middle of the night.

I was once in a fiction-writing class, back in college, during which I was publicly chastised with that phrase exactly (with a white board chart) for writing about a fictional version of myself wandering around Manhattan looking for something to do. Also, there are no Wal-marts in Manhattan, a fact which had escaped me even after living in New York for a year and a half.

That being said, a cursory look at my ramblings from the past decade shows me essentially what I am already been aware of -- that I have spent most of my 20s recording the painful -- if somewhat obvious -- revelations of someone doing everything for the first time.

In 1999 I was possibly the most clueless long-haired college freshman who has ever embarked upon a journey of enlightenment at an upstanding east coast liberal arts college, who just as unconsciously went through the obligatory Felicity identity transformation by getting a dyke haircut, the first of several I would sport in next decade.

By my sophomore year I definitively reached the stunning conclusion that the U.S. political system was a horribly corrupt shell game, mainly inspired by having spent a semester unironically reading political analysis on Slate, only to cast my first vote for political office (for Nader) in the 2000 election fiasco.

In 2001 I lived in Paris, and would have struggled to understand the importance of the "cultural experience" I was supposed to be having visiting movie theaters, listening to the BBC and being trekked around on tour buses to various artists' ateliers, even if I hadn't spent most of year watching the world catch on fire.

I discovered Virginia Woolf in 2002, and not realizing that entire latter-era sexual revolutions had put her on t-shirts and in songs, took her message of a "society of outsiders" to heart in a way only someone who chose a college based on the selling point, "you are different, so are we" could.

I marched against things in 2003, or more often watched others march against them from the sidelines. But the start of an unnecessary war affected me deeply, nonetheless, and I still get PTSD-like flashbacks from decade-in-review montages of Colin Powell presenting bogus intelligence to the U.N., which bring back memories of watching horses walk into crowds of pedestrians on Lexington, and witnessing "shock and awe" on cable news stations, and of the feeling of utter helplessness and depression that came with attending a rainy, late-night protest of defeated antiwar protesters corralled by NYPD barricades the night after the war started.

By 2004, it's all subway poles and sex, as I was sure that no one in the history of the world had ever experienced either in the way I had just discovered them, with fresh eyes on a commute full of strangers, and with a boy who tempestuously loved me and broke my heart, to a soundtrack of Arcade Fire and Ani DiFranco.

After 2005 things became more complicated. I settled down to an ongoing blur of domestic squabbles with filmmaker roommates in a dirty Brooklyn apartment, traded political rants with like-minded fellow travelers, worked shitty office jobs because it was no longer cool to work in retail, and wondered if there was any beauty to be found outside the grind of subway commutes.

I found beauty later in the decade, impossible, unlikely beauty, in the corners of dirty activist spaces and rickety elevators, in shoddily converted lobbies closely resembling The Shining, and at monuments to fallen martyrs and mythological creatures.

I started writing in 2006, or at least, taking my writing seriously, and by 2007 tried by hand at organizing, with occasional moderate success, and looked forward to changing things, because, well, that was the only thing I could do.

By 2008 I was stuck with the creeping feeling that the path I was taking would only lead me toward a kind of irreparable brokenness, evidenced by the fact that I was often surrounded by a motley crew of people who long ago had traded rational perspectives and domestic happiness for the chance to rule over isolated kingdoms of political dysfunction.

But, in between all of it, I got tired, and a little older. And suddenly I didn't feel like I was seeing things for the first time, but as if I were on a loop. And by 2009 my journal became a series of sighs and regrets over people sacrificed and opportunities lost. And I no longer wanted to go back and read any of it again.

I spent the first moments of 2010 sitting in a crowded hole-in-the-wall sushi place in Tumon, Guam's downtown tourist playground.

The overly enthusiastic wait staff handed me a plastic noisemaker in the shape of a hand, and one of those cylinders you blow in to make noise during such occasions, I'm not sure what they're called, while some kind of culturally incomprehensible Japanese variety program played in the background.

Then I walked through back lots past half naked dancers who were taking a break outside of strip joints, and sat on a sandy crowded beach to watch a lackadaisical fireworks display over the moon-lit bay.

It was nice, probably the nicest New Year's I have had in a while, involving actually leaving my apartment to interact with the world.

Still, like most people hung over from the night's revelry, I am now sitting on my bed in pajamas, eating banana pudding, surrounded by the familiar piles of books covered with my handwriting, glad to have a place that is still mine amidst all of the changing scenery.