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[pegkerr]

EMBODIMENT PAPER JOURNAL PROJECT 2008 | LEARN MORE + JOIN


This is an interesting community to watch, because people do such imaginative things with their journals. As I've noted before, I've been keeping a daily journal since the age of 14 (and I'm 47 now). I'm such a creature of habit about it: I always buy the same type, the At-A-Glance Standard Diary that has one page a day:

Standard Diary

But, as I've noted several times this past year, I've had some unusual trouble this year keeping it up. I've skipped days at a time, which is something I never used to do. My entries feel dry and uninteresting, and I continually fight the feeling, "I've said this all a million times before, so why repeat it?" Partly it's the depression, of course, and perhaps part of the trouble is that I'm keeping this LiveJournal, too, and the two sort of compete for my energy. And frankly, the LiveJournal is rather more fun, because I can add links and pictures and get comments back. But I still would like to keep up a paper diary, too.

I wonder whether trying to get boldly experimental, like some of the folks at the embodiment community do, would help. I've never considered myself much of a visual artist, but perhaps if I added more of an element of play to the paper version, that might help?

Do you keep a paper journal as well as your LiveJournal? How long have you done so? How do the two different journals perform different roles for you? Why do you like to keep both? What do you do to keep the paper journal interesting for yourself? How have your journaling habits changed? (As you got older, your life changed, as you added LiveJournal, etc.)

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I have been keeping a paper journal since the early 80s. It serves me as a memory prosthetic more than anything else, and also as the one page per day that is the only writing-by-hand I do with any regularity. I like much the same sort of page-per-day journal as you picture above, save that it grows ever harder to find ones that aren't aimed primarily at a business context where half a page for Saturday and half a page for Sunday suffices. What keeps it interesting for me would appear to basically be how keeping it up-to-date eases my OCD tendencies.

My livejournal takes the form it does mostly to save me having to put the same paragraph of any news or interesting thoughts into email to a couple of dozen different friends every time anything happens, as well as helping me keep up with and be kept up with by acquaintances with whom a mail correspondence would probably not work; I also like the way that having a space that's mine has acted to allow cross-linking of circles of friends I have met through different shared interests, there are people I've known for ages would get on but to whom I would be the only point of contact, and lj allows that to happen in a natural and unforced manner.