March 30, 1981

Note to Jed... (9:14 A.M.) ANOTHER BORING HISTORY MORNING!

Just for the record, tomorrow we all have our driver (written) test. I'm going to get 100 on it. Mister Tom's talking now but I'm not going to listen. I hope I can play an April Fool's joke on Ellen. Thomas will help me. (Economic Determinism) ... (Dialectical Materialism) ... This shit sounds like it could be important. We have a test coming up anyway. (Marx was very much influenced by science).

Reagan was shot at the end of this day.

(Author's note: A lot of this early writing was done in the same notebook that I used for taking notes in all of my classes. That is why this particular early writing is so choppy. I was very depressed during this period of my life and concentrating became nearly impossible for me, so my mind would often wander to everything but schoolwork. But because I was sometimes listening, I recorded sporadic things heard here and there and they got mixed in with my writing. At this very early stage I had this sense that my notebook would be a record of both my life and of what was going on around me, and like most narcissistic teenagers, I felt my "notebooks," as I called them, would be valuable records of the past.

In recently re-reading my diaries, which I have never before attempted because they are thousands of pages long, I have learned that my diaries actually are valuable documents for my own personal therapy. I have learned that the way I have remembered things over the years is not the way they actually occurred back then. As I wrote these things at the time they happened, I can only assume that they happened the way they did, and that it is my memory which is lop-sided. The only way I can truly know for sure would be for me to actually talk about some of these things with the people who knew me back then and ask them how they remember things. I have asked Ellen a few questions, but she doesn't remember much).