Diary: November 1985.

Honestly, I remember nothing or near-nothing about this month. I certainly don't remember the upshot of Reagan v. Mondale. But does anyone, really?

I had been home-schooled for a few months now, so everything was fresh and bright and exciting. It was colder, so I doubt we were hitting any zoos; this might have been about when I had my brief stint in gymnastics (which went find, aside from my being a little hellion) until I got a piece of foam stuck in my eyes and cried and cried). We were probably visiting the Impressions 5 museum in Lansing. I was still pretty young -- only seven -- and so my ability to remember things is very much centered around dramatic events. This would have been a relatively placid month. I don't know. Maybe we watched Star Wars with the Steinbergs in the living room and ate cheese crunchies.

Where were you in November 1985?

Diary: November 2003.

This was one of those months that came at a generally frustrating time in life, and so I really only remember a couple specifically memorable events.

I was tying to direct the Nocturnal's production of Shelley's Cenci, but I was running into just about every barrier along the way... lack of space, lack of fund, unable to find a full cast; ideally I would have either quit my job to pursue these problems full-time or have aborted the project then and there. But I was saving up to buy an engagement ring, and I couldn't quit my job. And I was too stubborn to give up on the project.

I did run an evening-long workshop where we discussed Radiohead and J.M.W. Turner and how they could interface with the play. And politics. Like I said: all ambition and brimstone, but short of hope.

It didn't help either that I was a month into a yearlong temp assignment, which would turn out to be stressful by dint of intradepartmental drama, if not the workload itself. I was getting paid $10 an hour, which was more than I'd made before, but not much, and not a whole lot considering what I was paying in rent and student loans.

But wait wait wait wait wait wait wait...

I'm missing important stuff...

This was the year that I did NaNoWriMo for the first time and drafted a novel called Adrift on the Mainstream, which would become Hungry Rats. Now I remember -- there was a launch party at a bar on Irving Park and Ashland, where I ended up spending the evening talking with a topologist from the U of C. Later that month we met up with a girl at the Med and discussed our novels-in-progress. And my own was finished at 41,000 words, so I had to scribble out 10,000 words of gibberish to cross the finish line. So artistically, this was a very memorable month for me, even if (evidently) short on good cheer.

I was running a role-playing game too, based in an Inca-derived cosmology that abutted J.R.R. Tolkien. So that helped to alleviate stress.

When I went home for Thanksgiving that year, I told my mom a secret; that I was going to propose to my girlfriend. That was why I had gotten a McKinley Park Studio for $435.00 instead of the Art Deco apartment I wanted off Bryn Mawr.

Character building?

It wasn't a bad yet; it was simply very fraught with.

Where were you in November 2003?

Diary: November, 1991.

Something I forgot to recount in the description of October was how late in the month (I have no idea why, but I emphatically believe it was the 20th, our director, Tony Coggins arranged a field trip to U of M Flint (which he attended) to tour their theater facility. Stagehands walked us through, explaining the flies, the spots, the rehearsal spaces and black boxes. It was a bright, sunny Saturday, crisp and cold; perfect October.

Maybe I remember that now because my main memory of November was how the play came more and more to take over my life. I had a fair number of lines to memorize, and while I don't remember our exact schedule I know that we came to spend several hours a day rehearsing after school. I was also involved in the band, and so I was pretty busy. The collective effort involved built toward a feeling of intense belonging and ownership with this group of people. It was something that, for a long time, seemed to specifically apply to theater, and is the main reason I became addicted to it for so long. But that moment hadn't arrived yet; it was still in the works.

The previous month's vampire obsession had also led me to rent Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. I beat the game, one of my very favorites, for the first time on Thanksgiving. My cousins came over, as did my grandparents and aunts, and later in the day we went for a walk back to the river. It was an amazingly mild day... windy, but we barely needed to wear jackets at all. In the field behind our barn there was one point where a dried out grey lumber post had been driven into the ground before the horse shelter. As we walked back I looked at it, and everything seemed about that time seemed to swirl around the point of that post: vampires, the gothic, theater, and impending cold. All swept up in gray grass, leaveless tree branches, gray skies, and wind.

Where were you in November, 1991?