I've long meant to realize this project of mine transcribing entries from my old notebooks into online text. That way if anything were to happen to the original notebooks, I'd still have a record preserved, however clumsily. The ideal would still be to scan each page and save them it as an image, but I don't have the hours worth of access to a scanner necessary for such an undertaking, and right now it's not that important. Hence text.

The reason any of this is important at all is that these marbled composition notebooks hold a lot of what's necessary to understand my rapid evolution after I attended MSA, as well as the development of my current "voice" in writing. It probably sounds childish and self-important of me, but sometimes I have to remind myself that yes, I really did make a conscious decision to take up scholarly attitudes and thought-patterns at and after the academy. The foundations were there beforehand, but there was so much to soak up in that three-week stay at MSA that for a long time afterward I could scarce even remember most of the year leading up to it...it just didn't seem important after that.

Over this Thanksgiving "break" I found another old notebook, one not so full of the bounty of quotes, scribbles, and erudite writings as the latter two, but still an illustrative one—it was from sophomore year, chronicling things I'd largely forgotten doing, much less writing about. At that point in high school I was starting to turn my life around from freshman year, but it wasn't until MSA that it all got pulled together.

Now, sure, I'm speaking in vague terms, but I think those of you who knew me at the time will know more of what I'm speaking about. I'd describe it more adequately, but frankly I've worn out the language I used to use to describe it to myself, and these days it sounds overly idealistic. Hence I think less preambling and more transcription may clarify things a bit.

I also found copies of the old Ad Astras over break, as mentioned in my last post. I'm still pretty sure that only ten total issues ever got published before the ICKEE Society was veritably swept away in the wake of the drama girls' overwhelming narcissism and the "geek chic" success of Proxima, the new literary magazine established our senior year. As far as Ad Astra goes, though, I've got issues II, III, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X. Lookin' at 'em, the poetry is as bad as ever, but the variety in the first few issues shows that at first, the ICKEE Society had lofty ambitions to display art, stories, poetry, etc. It was quite an awesome undertaking.

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