Journaling

I've always loved journaling, and for the last few years, I've kept journals of my every day life that are fairly detailed. I like to think it's the kind of thing that all single people who live alone would enjoy doing. That's generally better than thinking of myself as an isolated weirdo.

These days, thanks to technology, people can write down all of the tedious minutiae of their everyday lives, and use it to bore complete strangers. That's called blogging.

My approach to journaling is slightly different. Slightly contrary, as is my nature. I keep journals the old-fashioned way: I write stuff down on paper. The process is rather slow, but it seems more "special." I can pull out the old papers years later, and they'll be lovingly worn and slightly dog eared. I can tell if I was trying to write quickly by how messy the writing is, or what kind of pen I favoured at the moment, or how bored I was feeling by what I doodled in the margins. The mood for the entire year gets determined by whatever colour of folder I choose to store the whole thing in. And unlike blogging, it's very difficult to actually write down every single thing that actually happens.

This creates an interesting dilemna. How do I decide what to write down? Generally speaking, events in most people's lives can be separated into two categories: good things and bad things. I'm not going to include "neutral" things, because those probably weren't worth writing down to begin with. Part of the reason I'm journaling to begin with is because I believe my memory - anyone's memory - is a delicate and notoriously unreliable thing. And sooner or later, parts of it are going to fail, like an old computer whose hard drive stops working one day. And once that begins to happen, the only record of my life is going to be whatever I chose to write down.

But here's the trick: since I choose what to write down, I've been in control of the overall mood of the journals. If I leave out the bad things that have happened to me, I can look back at my journals, reading nothing but good things, and think to myself, "Wow, my life has been FANtasTIC!" And depending on how much I remember, I might not even realize that I'm essentially lying to myself.

So...what do I do? Leaving out all of the bad things is wildly innacurate, and leaving in every bad thing is needlessly depressing.

I write down every imporant thing that happens, good or bad. I try to give good things a higher priority. I try not to dwell on negative things, especially if they just aren't going to be all that important in the years to come. That time I was waiting at the bus stop and the bus didn't stop when it should have? No, not important. That time the mail order store sent me the wrong colour of paint? No, not important. That time my best friend died? Well, yes - that's pretty important. Too important to leave out. That time I made the greatest ever omelet for breakfast? Well...that WAS pretty good...but not quite important enough to write down.

Keep your priorities straight, don't dwell on the negative, and yes, your life's record can also be a wonderfully distilled account of how FANtasTIC your life has been. And...for the most part, it might even be quite accurate. Mostly.

Oh, and speaking of boring complete strangers with everyday minutiae: there's a new website now for people who seemingly can't get enough of doing exactly that. The site is called www.twitter.com and it's best described as a kind of micro-blogging. It works like this: In a couple of lines, you write down what you're doing at any given time of the day, updating it as often as you choose.

So, let me give you an example of how this works:

Me: "I'm eating dinner."
People reading my micro-blog: "Wow, he's eating dinner now!"

For anyone whose Sarcasmometer is malfunctioning at the moment, www.twitter.com is probably not going to be making my list of, "best ever uses for the internet."