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First Entry
May. 2nd, 2003 03:25 amI dunno about this. I'm one of those folks who've tried to keep a diary off-and-on for many years, and its never much worked. I'll keep it up for a few weeks, and then let it lay. I think the problem has always been that anything sufficiently non-personal that I was willing to commit it to paper was hardly worth writing about. If it was sufficiently personal that writing it down might help, then it was WAY too personal to ever chance anyone else seeing it. The resulting null intersection set was what I typically wrote down.
Its a shame too, since I have lousy memory for things I've done in the past, and the few fragments of diary that I have kept around all refer to places, events and things that are only the foggiest of memories now. Had I simply bothered to write down the boring stuff, I would be better off today. It reminds me of a class photo from grade 1 or 2 that I still have somewhere. It came in a cheap cardboard stand-up frame that my Mother threw out when she put the photo in a family album. The problem was, she never looked carefully at what she was throwing away (she never does). On the back of the frame, in the place provided, I had written down the names of all of my classmates. Now, years later, I look at the photo and can remember these people, but not their names. I would love to know whatever happened to them, but I have no contact information. If I ever hear from them again, it'll be because they contacted me.
Anyway, why do I think this time it'll be different? I dunno. It may just be that, being the nosy parker that I am, I'll think it worth writing a diary if I get to read the diaries of my friends. It may also be that I have far fewer secrets these days. I vaguely remember (there's that problem again) an event that occurred some time after my wife and I were dating. We may even have been married already. Anyway, we were having a conversation about embarrassing things, and she piped up with "Oh, yeah, it like that time that you ...." And proceeded to tell me my most private and embarrassing secret. I realized then that if I had told her THAT (and I had no memory of telling her), then I had told her EVERYTHING. I no longer had any secrets that I alone knew.
That was a bit of a mind blower. What's more, I found out something about myself and secrets. Once ONE other person knew, it wasn't much of a secret in my mind anymore, and it wasn't nearly so embarrassing. Whatever the secret was that she recounted on that day, it ceased to be a secret, and sort of shriveled up and died. It was something I had kept hidden and punished myself with for years, and now I have no idea what it was, or even sort-of what it was about. Neither does my wife. Last time I mentioned the incident, she remembered how she startled me, but doesn't remember what the secret was either.
So, maybe I'm "mature" enough now to actually keep a diary (and a public one at that), or maybe this will be the last entry I write for the next 5 years. Stay tuned. We'll both find out at the same time.
Its a shame too, since I have lousy memory for things I've done in the past, and the few fragments of diary that I have kept around all refer to places, events and things that are only the foggiest of memories now. Had I simply bothered to write down the boring stuff, I would be better off today. It reminds me of a class photo from grade 1 or 2 that I still have somewhere. It came in a cheap cardboard stand-up frame that my Mother threw out when she put the photo in a family album. The problem was, she never looked carefully at what she was throwing away (she never does). On the back of the frame, in the place provided, I had written down the names of all of my classmates. Now, years later, I look at the photo and can remember these people, but not their names. I would love to know whatever happened to them, but I have no contact information. If I ever hear from them again, it'll be because they contacted me.
Anyway, why do I think this time it'll be different? I dunno. It may just be that, being the nosy parker that I am, I'll think it worth writing a diary if I get to read the diaries of my friends. It may also be that I have far fewer secrets these days. I vaguely remember (there's that problem again) an event that occurred some time after my wife and I were dating. We may even have been married already. Anyway, we were having a conversation about embarrassing things, and she piped up with "Oh, yeah, it like that time that you ...." And proceeded to tell me my most private and embarrassing secret. I realized then that if I had told her THAT (and I had no memory of telling her), then I had told her EVERYTHING. I no longer had any secrets that I alone knew.
That was a bit of a mind blower. What's more, I found out something about myself and secrets. Once ONE other person knew, it wasn't much of a secret in my mind anymore, and it wasn't nearly so embarrassing. Whatever the secret was that she recounted on that day, it ceased to be a secret, and sort of shriveled up and died. It was something I had kept hidden and punished myself with for years, and now I have no idea what it was, or even sort-of what it was about. Neither does my wife. Last time I mentioned the incident, she remembered how she startled me, but doesn't remember what the secret was either.
So, maybe I'm "mature" enough now to actually keep a diary (and a public one at that), or maybe this will be the last entry I write for the next 5 years. Stay tuned. We'll both find out at the same time.
