A little while ago, my (two) friends and I put on our mature pants,  
and had a dinner party to welcome another friend into a new apartment  
complete with wine and a grown-up style cheese plate. The apartment  
came furnished by the owners, who were also in their mid-twenties,  
and came with several peculiar idiosyncrasies, including (but not  
limited to) a 1980s style Jack LaLane barbell set, a container filled
with Maxell Cassette Mix Tapes, and
three forks (total). Also strewn casually amongst  
the knick-knacks was a red spiral notebook with characters from
The Disney Afternoon on the front.
As we sat around admiring the new place and  
marveling at the noises emanating from the heater, one of my friends  
picked up the notebook and had a look inside.

"Oh my God," she said, her mouth hung open. "This is a girl's diary."
She scanned some pages. "I think it's from college."

We all paused for several seconds contemplating the meaning of our  
discovery. A diary is someone's personal muse, the secret key to  
their secret garden of internal contemplation and, um, secrets. Its  
intimacy and raw edge provide a rare-behind-the-scenes look into  
someone's worries, fears, loves and prescription drug addictions.  
Diaries are meant to stay away from the public eye, a locked box of  
clandestine emotions, like that spot Jodie Foster and her daughter  
get locked in in Panic Room, but smaller.

My friend Mary put down the book.
"We can't do this," she said.
"This is wrong," my other friend Alissa said.
"I like don't feel great about this," said the Big Cat.
We were questioning our own morals. Clearly, the group needed someone  
to take charge. And me being a natural leader of men (and women), I  
stepped in.
"No," I said, (probably) rolling up my sleeves. "They don't have any  
board  games. We need this."

And so, friends, in lieu of saying Grace pre-dinner, we each read a  
specific entry from a different part of her college experience. Mine  
entailed a particularly vexing incident with a boy that I will call  
Casey and her distaste for but continued consumption of Red Bull  
mixed with Vodka.

 From a writing standpoint, I was completely and utterly enthralled  
by the diary. The girl, writing only for herself, would confide to  
the diary with specific context (for example, she would write "in  
case you don't know, I'm talking about (this guy)") and would change  
from angry to happy in the difference of one to two sentences. But  
most interesting, I think, was the similarity that the diary has to  
first person fiction. Every diary is really someone's own novel,  
crafted and formed the way that they remember, cultivating a  
narrative voice that records the most important events, usually  
having something to do with boys, getting kind of drunk, and making  
out. But it also, albeit rarely, helps the writer make personal  
connections and links that they hadn't thought of before. It was like  
the real version of William Boyd's fantastic novel Any Human Heart,  
except instead of Oxford, WWII, and the burgeoning art scene of 1950s  
NYC, we learned about guys that sux.

Ultimately, I think, reading the college diary of a girl that none of  
us knew, who lived 2,000 miles away, wasn't the worst thing I've ever  
done. I mean, it wasn't the best thing either, but it would probably  
place somewhere in the middle. Anyway, I'm curious to hear what you,  
my wise readers, have to say about this. Would you have done the same  
thing? Do you keep journals? Would you ever leave your college diary  
in a drawer with playing cards and a bunch of reggae mix tapes in an apt  
that you just subletted to strangers? I await your moral judgment,  
own stories of questionable taste, and several photocopied pages from  
your high school diaries.

Love in an,
Elevator

Aerosmith

PS- As per request, a particularly intimate Open Arms By Journey.