anniversaries

For me, today isn’t just New Year’s Day—it also marks the 25th anniversary of when I began keeping a journal. One of my gifts from my grandparents on Christmas 1982 was a diary with carefully dated pages:

I was 8 ½ years old and in the third grade. My sixth-grader sister Kristen got a diary, too, but hers was pink and a bit more grown-up than mine.

On January 1, 1983, I wrote my first entry:

(My spelling and handwriting were terrible, not because I was learning disabled but because of sheer laziness. I always did well in language arts classes and could write neatly when it suited me, but when writing in my diaries, sloppiness and laziness took over!)
x

I’m so thankful that my grandparents had the foresight to expose me to the wonderful habit of journal writing. I have no doubt I would’ve discovered this lovely task on my own at some point (probably when the teen angst kicked in, ’round about the ninth grade), but a wealth of recorded life would be lost if I had only picked up a pen in, say, 1989. Years of flotsam—the minutiae of daily life during my formative years—would be gone forever. My barely legible scribblings, rants against Kristen, starry-eyed mooning over school crushes, unbridled excitement over receiving my first Cabbage Patch Kid…none of that will move mountains or change the course of history, but it’s part of my history, and for that reason—no matter how inane it seems—it’s important to me, and I’m glad I have it documented.

I confess, though, that laziness did drive me to surrender pens and notebooks in favor of typed journal entries by mid-1997. Typewritten entries don’t have the charm of their handwritten bretheren, but to be fair, when my life began increasing in speed thanks to full-fledged adulthood, finding the time and energy to write all that needed to be written became increasingly difficult, and since typing is less tiring than writing, and it can be done more quickly, switching to electronic writing was actually a way of preserving the art of journal writing. I doubt my journals would’ve slipped by the wayside completely, but they probably would’ve entered starvation mode. And I did decide to compromise. Rather than maintaining a journal exclusively on my computer, I opted to print out all of my typed entries and insert them into three-ringed binders, which are numbered and dated. It gives me the best of both worlds: a) quick and easy writing, and b) the satisfaction of holding a physical book in my hands.
x

This month also marks 15 years since I officially started my quotations collection. I was a college freshman home on winter break when I decided to use the blank journal I’d received from my best friend on Christmas 1991 to formally record the myriad quotations scattered throughout my journals and personal notebooks. It quickly became a passion and I quickly became a full-fledged quotes whore. Fifteen years later, my collection is still going strong, and it’s bigger than ever. It’s been solely electronic since 2000 and at some point I want to learn how to make it searchable, too. All in good time!

song heard most recently before posting:
Bunker or Basement—Fionn Regan