The other day I realized suddenly that I have been writing in journals daily for over eleven years! As of today, it will have been 11 years and 27 days. What brought this fact to my attention is that I had just received the new daily schedule for middle school, and I decided on a whim to write out my teaching schedule in my journal. As I wrote, I laughed, thinking that I felt like I was in high school again because I used to do stuff like that when I was younger, writing details about my classes in my journal.
It didn't take me long to verify this fact. My freshman year schedule was listed on Wednesday, August 26, 1998 (along with my new locker combination); sophomore year schedule was detailed on Wednesday, September 1, 1999; junior year schedule was written out on Tuesday, September 5, 2000; senior year schedule was shared on Tuesday, September 4, 2001. I don't think I kept up this pattern in college.
On one hand, it seems completely ridiculous to record such minor incidents as the fact that my junior year, I had World History fourth period in room 174 with Mrs. Wood (which, I also commented, was my old English room from freshman year). But on the contrary, I love these details; I love knowing that I can pick out any day in the past eleven years and get a glimpse into what I was thinking about at that moment in time.
A few tidbits from over the years:
- July 15, 1998: saved a Wrigley's Extra sugarfree gum wrapper as a joke
- August 25, 1998: declared a new favorite hymn, #51
- January 5, 2000: accidentally killed a ladybug that was walking around on my desk
- 19 febbraio 2000: played in an orchestra concert at the Chiesa del Redentore, in Venice
- December 5, 2002: drew a diagram of how I rearranged my bedroom
- October 31, 2003: took 32 visitors to the college's production of "Dancing at Lughnasa" on a visiting weekend
- November 2, 2004: wrote on scraps of paper every few hours to document a typical day
- May 19, 2005: went to the opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in Dresden
- June 11, 2006: taped in a notecard of German pronouns (after throwing the rest of them away)
- October 27, 2007: wrote from Jacques Imo's, a popular restaurant in New Orleans
- January 10, 2009: went on a bird walk in the snow
I have written from Princeton, St. Louis, Elgin, Winchcombe, Vienna, Brussels, Florence, Paris, Madrid, San Jose, Jacksonville, Phoenix, Indianapolis (etc., etc.), filling 22 journals so far.
I'm currently reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones. She muses, "A writer's job is to make the ordinary come alive, to awaken ourselves to the specialness of simply being." That's how I regard the slowly growing pile of journals stacked on my bookshelves. They are an homage to the ordinary thoughts that fill my days, but recorded just for myself in a way that makes them feel extraordinary when I poke around them years later, sitting in my living room at night with a cup of tea and a batch of new thoughts ready to be immortalized.
