Fragments of myself
I just finished archiving 17 years of electronic journal entries. 1990 - 2007. For some reason, 1991 is missing, but it’s probably somewhere in some floppy disk, maybe never to be retrieved.
In addition to these 17 years, I also have about 16 years of paper diaries. That’s 33 years’ worth of my life in those entries.
I cringed as I caught fragments of my writing when I opened up each file to re-save in a cross-platform format that can be opened in a wider variety of word processors than the proprietary ones. (I will probably never read each entry in detail, but it’s nice to know they’re there, if only as a record of my often wasted years. But I digress … )
Over the years, I have kept my electronic journal in a variety of word processors, including WordPerfect, a bit of WordStar, Lotus WordPro and Microsoft Word. Now, all the entries have been saved to Rich Text Format.
I also used a couple of fancy journal software - Yeah Write, which allowed colour backgrounds and fancy fonts to give the journal a more personal “hand-written” look, and The Journal, with a calendar to select a specific date and go quickly to a specific entry. But both are proprietary, and I worried that I might not be able to access the entries one day. Good thing both have an export feature that allowed me to extract the entries.
As I went through each year’s entries, I noticed that I started writing less from 2005. That was the year my father passed away, and I thought that was the reason. Then I remembered I’d started keeping an online journal, aka blog, around that time.
So, in addition to my off-line journal, I also have my blog (three of them in fact, but only one is active, while the other two are older blogs no longer updated). At some point, I will have to look at archiving my blog offline. It’s kind of self-indulgent (narcissistic?), it’s not like my writing’s any good, but it is my writing, it is an extension of me, how I felt at a certain point in my life, an attempt to articulate my thoughts and maybe even provide a commentary about the state of things at that point.
It’s occurred to me that where before I used to write mostly in one place (paper diaries between 1973 and 1989, and electronic journal from 1990 onwards), I am now writing in at least two places - my offline electronic journal and my online blog. In addition, there are the notes I jot in my various paper notebooks. All of which have contributed to a rather fragmented me, which may explain why I’m not altogether here a lot of times.
Excuse me while I go and try to stitch myself together.
