by Worker Bee

So I’ve always had a bit of trouble in keeping an everyday journal, and I always regret the fact that I have trouble keeping a journal. In recent years, I have combated my lack of a journal with various record keeping of my online communications. Originally this took the form of saving all IM conversations I had with anyone (well, I still do that), but more recently it has also taken the form of emails. For the past couple of years, I have been an avid e-mailer with various people, but at this point my emails with one or two people have essentially become journal or diary entries that one other person gets to read. For one reason or another, I find it much easier to keep a journal when it’s in the form of writing a letter to someone else, especially if I think that they’ll bother to read it. Anyways, that method of journaling does essentially work, but it only works as long as I have someone to email with and a computer with internet access. Of course, I can write letters by hand as well, but then it’s the person that I send the letter to that has a copy of it, not I.

I’ve also always tried to keep a travel journal, but generally I fail. This year however, over spring break my family traveled to Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Texas, because we have family there, the other four, because for many years, my sister and I had been to 46 out of 50 states and those four were our remaining ones. So I felt like this trip was extra special, and I was quite determined to actually manage to keep a travel journal, and I did. It was just a small notebook 80 pages long, and each page is only about 3 inches by 4 inches; tiny pages. In the end, I probably averaged writing in it for about 1 or 2 hours a day, which is really quite a lot. Over the course of a week, I filled up 40 pages (Front and back) in that notebook. But since those are small pages, the number means nothing. Of course, now that I’ve typed it up as well, I can tell you that it is about 10 pages long in a single spaced size 10 lucida grande font.

I am now so glad that I actually managed to keep up with a travel journal for that week. Now things that I typically would have forgotten in a matter of weeks, or even days, I actually have a chance to remember forever. My persistence in writing, even when tired, even when in a car, even when it was getting dark out, has given me a chance to have memories. Whether of a cat who played fetch in Houston, a soda fountain in Mountain View, Arkansas, or a Blues restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee.

While I do hope that I can someday make myself keep a journal for myself not just when I’m traveling; for now I’m willing to settle for my emails to my friends as a record of my life. But at the very least, I hope that when I’m traveling this summer, I will once again keep a journal of what my travels bring.

It makes me curious though, who does actually manage to keep a journal?