In Keeping a Notebook
I woke up with rattling headache and a profound sense of annoyance because this is wont to happen in my days off, though the dishonor of constantly getting this experience is probably exemplified by my tendency to ride the boom-bust cycle of overwork and exhaustion. Because I'm also the paragon of mental stability, the next minute I was awash with melancholy. Suddenly, I could feel the rush of blood in my veins, millions of cells born and died and doing inexplicable things under my skin, my throbbing skull being the only thing between this dangerous world and my fleshy gray matters. It's truly a miracle to be alive, this human body so robust and so fragile at the same time, an interconnecting network working day and night until they cease to be.
In short, just a typical morning.
Found my old drawings and notes back from high school days. That sure brings back memories. I will never stop being amused by the fact that I've grown to be such a different person yet fundamentally the same. I still listen to the same songs. I still read the same books. I still like the same shows. They are, of course, punctuated by new discoveries, but I'll gladly spend my day the way I did at 17 today. Sometimes I do miss the days of teenage bravado, the snarky arrogance of a kid who thought they'd figured out life.
Having gone through depression, I have gaps in my memory. However, copious amount of notetaking attested to many many many things I have unconsciously excised. What an odd feeling, to see familiar hands filling pages after pages with events and feelings you could no longer find within you, not even vaguely.
The Notebook by Roland Allen was a delight, an excellent followup to another interesting book I finished this year: The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose. It prompts me to look over my own notetaking habits. Through my fallow years (in which there was dearth of creative practice due to taking multiple jobs) I kept no notebook at all. It was a deviation from the 13 years of constant companionship. Reflecting upon that, I found that I wasn't exactly correct in my assessment. I kept no physical notebook during the period, but I did maintain mountains of notes. I had resorted to scribbling things in a private Discord server that I could access during workdays right on my fingertips. The habit is invisible, its service invaluable in my day-to-day business, but it's so different than having something tangible to thumb over 15 years in the future. After all, I'll be the first to submit a testimony for the fragility of technology. My first novel manuscript, written 17 years ago, would be somewhere in my pile of hard disks, most likely corrupted. The longhand version still lives in my drawer, untouched by time.
Most of my notebooks contain little of myself. My interests, yes, but very rarely what I feel about something. I was put off from journal-like entries from an incident in my youth, but even after I no longer have to censor myself I don't process myself that way on the pages often enough compared to the amount of time I spend writing. But I have always been introspective, so why don't I-- then it dawned on me that I never had to. I have good friends and we talk a great deal about everything. We have a chatroom where we dump thoughts and ruminate over things freely, then have someone else sanity-check your thoughts (if you want, when you want). I don't write them down because I have somewhere else to process them. Which means my descendants might not know how I deal with everyday problems, but perhaps they don't have to. Or maybe somewhere somehow I should think of archiving for me in the future...
I used to be have strong opinions about digital vs. analog notetaking, but these days I think both has their places. It would be nice if digital half-life isn't as short, though. I have three hard disks filled with about 5TBs of files to sort through. Not an eye-popping amount, but I've been putting them off for a literal decade. It's Schrodinger's vault. I don't have to worry about them corrupted if I don't know that they are corrupted. I'd like to print my writings, but then I'd have to deal with printing expenses and storage...
Three sheets left in this sketchpad. I think I should go back and add notes to the finished paintings, if only as a memory-aide for me in the future. Things I intended, things that got changed, things I would have changed, or the good old practical list of materials. I've been very lazy in the latter, as I possess minimal materials and therefore should be able to pinpoint which was what, but lately I've been doing more and more mixed media works and custom ink mixing. Ink in spray bottles make fun marks.
Still nursing the headache. Waiting for it to abate, then maybe I can get one painting done tonight.