Feeling Pensive

Dumbledore: "I use the Pensieve. One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form."

Harry: "You mean... that stuff's your thoughts?"

Dumbledore: "Certainly." 

            ---- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 

 Now, I don't have a shallow stone basin carved with ancient runes and symbols into which I can magically channel my excess thoughts, but I do have my journal.  
And I just realized that it's kinda the same thing. 

I remember being 12 and attending a particularly exhilarating YM/YW activity at the Fort Sam Houston pool.  There were some boys in attendance who were just the absolute cutest of cute.  We swam together in the pool and challenged each other to races down the water slides.  It was a pretty big highlight of my summer, obviously.  But then, a few days later, I thought back on what an exciting evening it had been, and I was disappointed to recall that the memory of everything said and all of our awkward pre-teen flirting was slowly losing its poignancy as I forgot important details from the night.  In that moment, I wished beyond wishes that I had a Pensieve, that I could physically dive back into my thoughts and experience those memories over and over again.  I don't have anything with such powers, but I do have my journal.  

And it comes pretty close.  

When I went to France after graduating from high school, I transitioned from writing in my journal by hand to typing it on the computer.  This way, I could simply snip excerpts from my overly-detailed journal entries that I was already writing for my own sake, splice them into an email, and send it off to my homebodies.  

Plus, I type waaaaaaay faster than I write.  

[I just took a semi-stressful typing test, clocking in at 104 wpm. I know FOR A FACT that I cannot write 104 words in a minute.  Who do we think I am, now.]

Writing in my journal is incredibly therapeutic.  I really just write down what's going on and what's happening to me, but I also include pivotal details like what I wore and what I ate (it's all very riveting) and then, of course, everything I'm thinking about how I'm feeling.  And before I know it, BAM.  
One week = 16 single-spaced pages of Katherine feelings.  

Just the other night, I came home from a somewhat unfortunate pool party, and I was feeling so jumbled all up inside my head.  I didn't have anyone to talk to about what was going on, and some of it was kind of personal, but what was I supposed to do with all these roiling tumultuous thoughts?  
 I wrote them down. I gently laid them out in a row in front of me, carefully dusted each of them off, and then went in and scrutinized them one by one with my magnifying glass.  Once I'd thoroughly detailed everything on my mind from that night and made some conclusive lists, that was it.  The tumult from my drive home had dissipated -- the feelings hadn't evaporated, but rather, I'd siphoned them off into my journal, where I could better examine them at my leisure.