Archive for the 'diary' Category

For the record

Published on 27 November 2006 in navel-gazing, diary and blogging. 6 Comments

Blogging has definitely made me more conscious of my year - I can go back through my archives and see what I was thinking about on this day last year, for instance (I was writing about a game, surprise, surprise - and about M’s first unicycle!). I also maintain a paper diary, but for some reason I am less conscientious about the diary and sometimes forget to write in it for for days at a time. I do wonder though - will this blog still be findable/readable in 10, 20, 100 years’ time? Will my diary? (maybe it’s time to investigate inks with archival properties.)

I don’t know if blogs and diaries can ever record everything there is to know about a person, although anyone who has access to both my blog and my diary may have a slightly more complete picture of the sorts of things that interest me. No doubt they would have a field day analysing why I leave out certain things, or why I only write about certain other things…

At this time of year all the This-is-the-Year-that-was articles and posts start to appear. I enjoy reading them to see if I can remember all the events referred to. It usually amazes me how much I will have forgotten about over the intervening months.
“Who won this year’s Melbourne Cup?” (hmmm… do I even care?)
“The miners. Where were they trapped again? I can’t remember their names, either…” (Is this terrible of me??)
“There was an earthquake in Indonesia this year, wasn’t there?” (Yes - in Yogyakarta in May - I actually wrote this down in my diary!)

What sort of a picture would a researcher of the blogosphere have of the year 2006?

I wonder about all the stuff that goes unreported and unremarked…

On diaries

Published on 11 September 2006 in diary. 3 Comments

I was just looking at my paper diary, which this year has been a day-to-a-page Moleskine. I use it to note things I’ve done or noticed:

  • bills paid
  • books read
  • letters written and received
  • the weather
  • interesting quotes from things I’ve read
  • how much daily exercise I’ve done (and excuses when I don’t do any!)

I’m not that good at recording everything though. There are days when so much happens that I am too busy to write it down.

I’m glad I’ve never been as obsessive as Robert Shields, though (as seen on normblog). This guy was so determined to record every single aspect of his life - everything he ate, his blood pressure and pulse at various times during the day, the temperature outside and in, every conversation he had, every piece of junk mail he received - that he didn’t let himself sleep for more than two hours at a time, so he could record his dreams. How much could he have actually enjoyed his life?

I don’t think my diary is anything as noble as what Susan Sontag kept: “The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather — in many cases — offers an alternative to it.” (via Moleskinerie.) My diary is definitely not a journal in that sense, or if it is, it is a record of the completely mundane me.

Old diary

Published on 4 August 2005 in diary. 5 Comments

Last night I dug up the diary I kept in 1991 and 1992. It is a battered 416 page exercise book with apple green and black stripes on the cover and two stickers from a women in tertiary education conference on it. My handwriting looks very strange and flat - literally flat in the sense that the letters are formed close to the lines on the page. Proof that if nothing else, my handwriting has changed over the years.

I don’t know if I can bear to read the whole thing too closely because I was such a miserable git back then. How does it go? Youth is wasted on the young!

In 1991 I went to Sydney and Melbourne for the first time, for aforementioned conference. According to my entries, the conference was tedious, it was very cold and wet, and I was either sick with a cold, or wishing I was home. I actually wrote that “I didn’t pay much attention, i didn’t want to attend, didn’t want to be there.” So why on earth did I go, I wonder? Back then I was a poor struggling student so it would have been hard to scrape the pennies together for airfares and such. I don’t remember now, and my motives are not stated in any of the entries around that time.

1992 was the year I spent in Hangzhou, China, as an exchange student. I was a miserable git that year too. Judging from my diary I was homesick and missing family and friends for much of the year. Or maybe I only wrote in my diary when I was feeling homesick and missing my family and friends - heh! I wrote really pathetic things like “Just wrote a cheerfully positive, descriptive letter to Mum after during which i got inexplicably depressed thinking ‘i mustn’t write as if i’m going well - something terrible is bound to, going to, happen to me!’ And i didn’t even want to write this in this book, just wanted to put it out of my mind. So what is this, some horrid premonition? Or is it just me as usual, not letting myself feel good about anything without putting some sort of a dampener on it?” (Terrible!)

It’s not exactly true that I only wrote when I was feeling miserable though, as I did describe lots of people I met and things I did. Sadly, I don’t really remember a lot of it all that clearly now, and there are plenty of incidents that I have completely forgotten about - even re-reading the diary doesn’t prompt the memories. It is good to reread bits and think about those long ago times…

There are also a few pictures I drew in the diary, mostly little sketches illustrating how I was feeling at the time - lots of glowering, sulking CWs wallowing in her gloom. That’s one thing I miss with writing in the electronic medium - you can’t doodle in the margins. And then there’s the feel and smell of the book - you don’t get that with a blog! Slipped in among the pages I’ve even got some old grain ration coupons (do they still use these in present day China?), some renminbi notes in small denominations, and drafts of letters written on ultra thin Chinese paper. There were no Internet cafes back then and all my communication with family and friends was via handwritten letters - I wonder if anyone has kept any of the letters I wrote back then.

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