My Life of Journals
Thursday, 10-02-2003: What I would really like to do is this – take all my old journals from notebooks and other computer programs and somehow convert them into this journal. The problem with that idea is that all of my journals since grade school or so have disappeared at some point. I started keeping one in a regular sized notebook around 5th grade or so. I probably ended up throwing that away or something. Then I had others that I kept in pocket-sized Mead notebooks and would actually carry around with me 24 hours a day. I have no idea where those ended up, probably in the trash. In junior high I kept a semi-daily journal on my TRS-80 computer. Originally I kept it stored on a cassette tape drive but then upgraded to keeping it on 5 1/4″ floppy disks when I got a disk drive for it. For all I know, those disks could still be sitting around my parents house. I upgraded to using Composition books in high school because I began to think that the TRS-80 might be becoming obsolete soon but I remember destroying one of those because my parents were reading them when I was out of the house.
I left home after high school and continued with the Composition books for maybe a year after high school and then switched to using a Day Runner-type organizer and writing daily things into the calendar spaces. I ended up writing about a lot of illegal activities in the Composition books so I kept those hidden in a space under the back seat of my car. When my car died and I left it in a parking lot in Texas, I forgot to bring the journals with me. So I stuck to the Day Runner thing for the next year. After I started getting into all kinds of legal problems in Highland, IL and kept getting visited by the police I decided to burn my Day Runner logs because of all the illegal activities it contained. I didn’t want to have the police confiscating it, you know?
SO THEN…I think my next move was going without a journal for about a year. Then I started inputting everything into a Casio organizer that I got from Radio Shack. A silly idea since there would be no way to print things or convert them into any other format. I probably lost that journal when the batteries died. After getting a laptop computer, I started doing journal entries in the Windows 3.11 Calendar program. I might still have backups of those somewhere because I’m sure I backed those up. From there I quit using a journal for awhile because I was writing everything I did into the PLA issues. I just started doing the journal thing again a little over a year ago into an ASCII editor. Every few months the journal gets backed up onto a CD. And then I started posting the journal on this page just so I could feel like I’m a cool person that has a Live Journal. Plus my journal will probably get backed up onto archive.org so I guess there’s no chance of me losing it now. But it sure sucked that I’ve managed to lose pretty much all of my journal writing for the past 20 years or so. I’ll try to do better from now on.