During the final days of my Bachelor’s degree most of us tried to do everything we wished for with the aim to enjoy to our fullest before the exams. Most of it involved visiting different places, restaurants, ordering foods online (the beginning days of online takeaways), watching movies/TV shows together, etc. At that time to document my experience, I bought a simple diary with no sort of date/calendar. Just a collection of white papers, nothing else. One of my friends he took it to the next level by buying a much creative, vintage looking diary and am still not happy with amazon for not showing that up to me when I was looking for such kind.
For the first two weeks I literally had no idea how to make use of it. Since I had the habit of writing a log about my life everyday during my freshman year (stopped it later), I started writing a collection of things happened in a descriptive way with a date on top. That was the same time I started reading and since the books I read were mostly on history, facts, ideologies, etc I felt the descriptive stories I wrote were totally different from those I read. Thankfully I had a chance to watch two movies Gone Girl and Chef at that time. In the former there is a character in the movie who writes a fake log of her husband which kind of turns up against him and the latter ends with the chef’s son creating a video which is a compilation of ‘a’ second of moments everyday with his father in the food truck.
I am not sure what the spark I got, but from that day on I started to create a list of whatever I do. Just to give an example, I would list the books I read, places I visited alone, TV shows I watched, movies I tried but the list is insanely big, stories I have written, and so on, pretty much a list of almost everything.
When we are writing a diary, we tend to become more emotional, more than honest, overly creative which exceeds the fact that lies in it. When it comes to preparing a list of whatever we do, it is not something emotional or creative, it is just a list of facts in a proper order. And it is not built in a day, it demands just a minute of everyday to note that down and if you take a look back at it after five years you can literally see your activity being quantified perfectly. I know it is overdramatic, but if everyone of us started to make such lists, the saying History is written by the victors would no longer make sense in our society.
Of course we have this great wizard which exactly knows our digital footprint trying to make our lives better without the need for us to track anything but I believe we should have control over what we track and you cannot get the high of tracking that in paper from anywhere else. On the positive side, we would have our own version of history with 100% absolute facts with no creative or emotional influence. I do know that I am promoting paper works in a digital space but I got no other way.
With that positive note, I think it is also my responsibility to end my story with a warning that to not take this note thing too far and don’t be a loser like Ross Geller, even if you do don’t go public with that. If you know what I mean.
Cheers
Hatty
Hatty diaries 