I can’t believe it’s almost Easter again – the weeks and months are flying by. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing; they say that time flies when you’re having fun, but there’s also great enjoyment to be had in slowing things down and watching the minutiae of life; the little things that you don’t notice from day to day, but would miss if they suddenly vanished. Unfortunately time seems unwilling to stop on command, but this is one of the things I really value a diary for; I can look back and realise what I was thinking, what I noticed on any particular day.
I’ve never kept a paper diary, but I have a private blog that I’ve kept up to date for six years. Every so often I’ll dip back in, and at the end of the year I have the entries printed and bound (blog services come and go; I’d rather my memories weren’t lost because a company went under). It’s almost the same as a real diary: although it doesn’t have the doodles and footnotes that you’d have in a real journal, lately embedded Flickr photos have started illustrating a lot of the entries.
I’ve always been online to some extent, and I have plenty of friends who are the same. Previous generations wrote stories and drew pictures on paper; by the age of eight I was writing in WordPerfect and drawing with Corel. When I was fourteen I was uploading computer games I’d written to bulletin board systems, and two years later I had a technology website (not this one, I hasten to point out). This stuff is my bread and butter, but even I’m behind with a lot of technology compared to a lot of the people who are currently K-12 and undergraduate students. I find some of the things they do with their phones and games consoles (which, as I’ve noted before, are now more like subsidised PDAs) incredible.
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