The strange part is that because I stopped counting each year (or in the early part, half-years), I have to do the math to figure out how many it would have been.

2011 – 1997 is 14.

14.

On this day I tip my virtual hat to BvP and hope he’s doing well, wherever the tides have taken him.

What *was* rare is that I dumped the notebook into my bag and actually used it. While I’ve been blogging forever (in blog-years, anyway) this wee notebook held the minutae of my week to week existence. This notebook, with its coffee-stained pages, cracked spine and missing bookmark ribbon is the closest thing to a personal diary I’ve ever had.

I wrote on the very first page on 3/13/05, when I was keeping track of my carb intake.

Here’s the question I was going to ask John McCain at the Town Hall back in 2008, but never had a chance to:

It’s littered with little quotes and gems like this:

And even when I had to tear a page out, I documented why:

There are plenty of pages where I kept reminding myself what I needed to buy when I moved out of the house:

(‘body poof’ – hee hee!)

And there are pages too personal to scan:
> The pages on which I practiced my “new-old” signature in the days before my divorce to get used to signing “Dowd” again.
> List of legal documents to bring to the courthouse with me.
> Notes from my tenure as Courier-Post Online manager, including details of great projects that never happened.
> REALLY bad NaNoWriMo ideas

But more often than not, there’s a cheeky page that makes me smile:

(I held this up during a webcam conversation w/ WM. Never let it be said that I can’t sell myself from time to time.)

Partially inspired by Secret Agent Josephine, I recently started sketching out summaries of my days when I had the time. This was from Sunday:

Those five years of shopping lists and quotes and doodles and directions and names of wines I liked covered what was probably the five most tumultuous years of my life. (actually, 3 years..the last 2 have been pretty calm, touch wood.) I will keep this little journal forever – it’s a compendium of dreams and despair and dreams yet again.

But there are only 8 pages left.

I wonder what the next 5 years will bring?

(I also went through some of my notebook pages on my World of Warcraft blog)

Notable about this picture is that only one poor schlub is really trying to win the costume contest at the 1984 Halloween parade. Everyone else is doing the usual over-11 costume of “hobo” or “50′s girl” or “hooker.”

Everyone except the clown at the far right.

Hang in there, little clown…even though all you got was an Honorary Mention, life gets better for you.

The Clairol Lock N Roll roller set was the BEST kit ever for putting a curl in my hair and keeping it there. Unfortunately, this was the cusp of the grunge movement, when big hair passed away as a fashion trend and aspiration.

RIP, big hair.

Abra cadabra peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!

That didn’t stop me from trying. This was a magic kit I got as a gift one year. My favorite magic item EVER, however, was a Harry Blackstone set that came with a gigantic hard cover book and a pimpin’ cassette tape.

The shirt says “Atlantic City, NJ.” The button says, “I believe in magic.”

This was always one of my favorites:

Thank you for everything, gang, and here’s to 40 more!

(squeal!)

(insane amount of giggling)

Click the video if you want to watch it in High Quality. If you want the old (read: good) stuff, start at about 2:33 into the performance.

Donnie is hot. There, I said it.

And this year I have reason to rejoice, because they feature the recipient of my very first fan letter, Jason Bateman.

Jason played “David,” the oldest brother on the sitcom Valerie, which was then called Valerie’s Family then the Hogan family after Valerie Harper quit the show. He was a handsome, roguish type, and in a scene from the opening of the show that forever remains burned in my brain, he played hockey. (Go here and forward to the :33 mark. Rawr!)

And now he’s 39 years old. And ohmigod….

…wow…

After all, I was smart.

Fast forward to present time. Names only stay in my head briefly. I’ve been teaching myself PHP unsuccessfully for, what, 4 years now? My vocabulary has become…has become…less gooder. I confuse words and muck up cliches. Consumer technology becomes harder and harder to master.

It calls to mind a book I read in middle school – Flowers for Algernon.

Summary:

• Lab creates drug that makes dumb mouse smarter
• Lab tries drug on mentally-challenged janitor.
• Janitor become super smart
• Mouse reverts to dumbness and croaks.
• Janitor realizes he, too, will be dumb again.
• Janitor becomes dumb again, but cruelly REMEMBERS he used to be smart.
• Tired of being pitied, he moves away from everyone he knows and starts over in a state home.

(isn’t it amazing that we all aren’t emo, given what they made us read in school?)

So in the “now” where my younger brother can beat me handily in Scrabble, and I’m my Facebook friends’ resident punching bag in Scramble, I wonder if I just grew into a brain that was very smart for a youngster and average for an adult, or completely losing it a la Algernon.

How about you? Do you find yourself dumbing down as you get older? Tell me I’m not alone here.