writing

"The unexamined life is not worth living for man." - Socrates (or Plato)

I keep a journal. I always have, ever since I can remember. Probably it started as me wanting to emulate my mom (which is a perfectly good reason to start something like that), who is a chronic journaler. Or "diarist," I suppose is the truly technical literary term for one who keeps a chronicle of one's own life.

When I was a teenager I wrote copiously, pouring out all my angst and all my arrogant ideas. I guess I had more time for it back then too, since I didn't have a TV when I was a teen, nor a computer with internet to waste time on. So I read and wrote a whole lot, and I have wonderful autobiography of that period. About 12 or 15 years ago I decided that I wanted to fill a book every year, and I started getting a dated book for each calendar year and designating a certain amount of space for each day or each week, with a couple of pages at the end so I could write a kind of summary. Every once in a while I'd fall so far behind that I couldn't fill the entire book by year's end, but by and large I'd fill the thing, if only to satisfy my own anal-retentive need to do things to completion.

A few years ago I started using a book that did not have dates in it, but provided approximately 1-2 pages per week for reporting and reflection. Each year I seem to be less able to finish up the entire book, despite meticulously figuring out how many pages I have to use and how many days to allocate to each page. This year, I wound up about 2 months behind, which sometimes really bugs me, but not enough to force me to sit down and fill the damn book up. It's just been such a good year, I didn't have enough angst to fill the book with, until the past few months, which have been characterized by a kind of suffering that requires me to file it away and attempt to forget about it, rather than writing it down for endless rehashing and analysis. So I haven't been writing a whole lot this year.

Now for my present dilemma. What I have been doing is writing in this here blog, which, while not providing an outlet for my innermost thoughts (yes, believe it or not I do have an even more private life than what you all read here), does give me an outlet for writing and reflection on less intimate topics. So, my question is, do I purchase a new book for 2005, and if so, which kind of book should it be? A full-size book that I can, say, paste blog entries into, and augment with extra private thoughts as they occur to me, or perhaps a book with smaller amounts of space, for general reporting? I'm leaning toward the former, which seems to make the most sense. I have a few more days to make the decision, and in the meantime I can review what little I did write last year, and prepare my annual summary. The blessing and curse of the examined life.