JohnnySwims

     My sister carries that journal with her everywhere, and frankly… I don’t understand the habit. I think it’s funny to watch her as she moves about her life and scribble furiously in the journal when she has downtime. She writes about (what I assume to be) her life like a dementia patient desperately clinging onto the last bit of continuity left in their life. She doesn’t share it with anyone — she nearly killed me the last time I touched it — and doesn’t post about it online, either. It truly is a personal hobby for her. I mean seriously, why would anyone ever journal...      To me, it’s a misallocation of her time and resources that could be spent on more intellectual pursuits, scrolling on TikTok or shopping online are good examples. What could be so enrapturing about a journal (a diary for the more cynical) that anybody would carry it around like an extension of their body? There is no world found inside the binding of that journal, it’s simply an ec...

In the short story Memento Mori , Earl (the main character) recalls elementary school when his “day planner was the back of [his] hand”. Ever since his development of “backwards amnesia”, he’s come to the unfortunate belief that “The best way to [live] is with a list”. The way I see it, the only thing that’s working backwards here is Earl pedantic philosophizing about life and organization, not his memory. Although that’s derived from my zealous need to justify an inordinately well vetted and sized Techo Kaigi , that is my planner/journal line-up.   Stemming from a slight (?) obsession with the weekly layouts , I have a multi-national lineup of flagship models that break my time into bite-size chunks for me to fill and exercise discretion over. In a way, I suppose that makes me more similar to Earl than it does alienate me from him. Where a numbered checklist suffices for his 10-minutes explorations, my elaborate Kaigi ward my amnesia to only strike weekly. His so affectionately ...