Nine Binders of Memories (and Counting)
Saturday, August 23, 2015
Nashville, TennesseeDreams like this prove I shouldn’t be watching Murder, She Wrote before going to bed. Part of this dream was like a scene in the episode I was watching.
This is part of the first entry in just over 9 mini-binders (so far) full of Journal entries.
Back when it was a thing (it’s still a thing, apparently), I had a LiveJournal online, but because it was a public space I wrote a bit cryptically and I don’t remember a lot of it. I went through it today and stopped counting after I found 9-10 names I had no idea who they were!
Going through my LiveJournal ultimately was a good thing - I was reminded of things like this 3 AM phone call from country singer Lee Ann Womack:
When I left home for college in 2002, my friend Devlin gave me a journal to write in that I’ve was very good about writing in, but I was so not sure what I wanted out of life that it was 99.9% negative and overall too painful to read so I sent it to the shredder a year or so ago. I’m not trying to write a memoir or anything but I want the person I’ve left this to in my will to be able to read this and possibly be entertained and certainly not depressed.
My struggle right now is figuring out a good way to update this so I don’t have long entries full of “catching up.” I thought about giving myself a prompt from a “Q&A” type book (see photo on the left), but that hasn’t worked successfully so far. I’ll get there.
One thing that has worked well, though, is the format I’ve settled into. Instead of writing everything by hand, I type my entries and print them out, filing them away in these small mini-binders. It might sound a little obsessive, but it’s actually turned into something I really enjoy.
Printing the entries gives me the flexibility to include photos and little mementos from the moments I’m writing about — things that would be hard to capture if everything lived only in a handwritten notebook. A concert ticket, a photo from a trip, something funny someone sent me — all of those things can live right alongside the story.
Looking back through them now, the binders feel less like journals and more like small time capsules.
I’m still figuring out the best way to keep up with it without feeling like I have to “catch up” every time I sit down to write. In the meantime, I’ll just keep adding pages to the binders — things like personal milestones, career landmarks, and the occasional story that probably needs a little explaining, like getting a note from a broadcasting legend.
