…about a month, little over, and what have I been doing for the past month? Well, I’ll tell you it’s nothing amazing. The most I’ve done has been adding rows to a spreadsheet. Said spreadsheet is a collection of the metrics and metadata from my journals of the past 16 years or so. The data I’m collecting is very basic stuff: Date, Time, Number of Line Written, Ink Color, Which Book I Wrote In, and if it was at least a full page. That’s actually all. I’ve gotten over 300 rows of data and I expect many, many more. I’m pretty sure I’m missing a number of journals because there’s a huge gap and I don’t remember not journaling for so long. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe it’s all lost to the aether. The sands of time, etc.

The goal of all this digital data collection is to make myself, for myself, a basic infographic of my journaling history. Just a couple of graphs to see what I’ve done over the past 16 years. From January 2009 to now. My thinking is that at the rate I’m going it will be a year before I’m current with the entries. I’m not moving super fast even though I’m trying to gather this basic data without reading the entries. Really trying to not read any of the entries but also can’t help it. A word, a phrase, a name, a place, anything might jump out to me and I get sucked in. Never a pleasant read. Not by a long shot.

Apparently I mostly journal when I’m upset about something. When I’m unhappy. Angry. A happy / excited entry is exceedingly rare. Almost never appears. Maybe it’s a symptom of depression, or a cause. Potentially both. Could it be i’m just a fucked-up individual who hates himself? Yes. It could be. There’d a definite, non-zero chance of that. Now, I’m not reading every entry, as I’ve said, however it’s not looking like I’ve been content with life. Ever. I need to talk about this more in a private setting, not so much on a public blog.

I’m planning on these graphs giving me some insight into my overall journaling habits. I’m not 100% sure they will though, based on the limited information I’m graphing. I could try transcribing them into a program to break them down based on content, word by word. However, that would be largely fruitless and impossible because I can’t read every word I’ve written. I might be able to read 50% of them at best. Probably way less than that. Just terrible penmanship getting worse every day. Why? Wish I knew. It’s not lack of effort when I write but probably something mechanical, medical, or mental. I have books on improving penmanship but have found they don’t really do anything for me. I don’t keep up with the exercises in them. I know.

Another big reason I don’t want to do the whole transcription is because I don’t want the entries in my journals becoming public because of a data-breach of some kind. If that were to happen they definitely wouldn’t let me out. I’m sure everybody who journals puts things down on paper they don’t want to be public knowledge. I can’t imagine anyone that would be OK with that. and that’s one of the main reasons I don’t do digital journaling. This is as close as I get to that. Also, I really just enjoy putting pen and pencil to paper to get thoughts out. The disconnect I have between thinking and typing is too great to overcome for journaling on a regular basis.