Tag: journals

Woohoo Wednesday!


My 2023 planner came. It’s inspirational and funny and quirky. I’ve been catching it up from Jan 1 until today with my daily doings and writing progress and using the photos and commentary from Patti Smith’s Book Of Days to nudge me in various directions of memories and thoughts.

It’s been a long time since I kept a date book. I’ve been mostly discreet with what I put on this blog because of my privacy and more importantly, other people’s. When I go back through my old date books and planners, there’s a lot of good info in them! Even these days, living a sheltered quarantine life, things are always happening.

Too bad I didn’t video myself putting on the monthly tabs for the comedy of it all. First, the tabs were going down the side at the beginning of each month, but it was aesthetically displeasing. I kept redoing it, and it felt like I needed to do geometry to space stuff right. I don’t do math unless I have to.

I was getting so frustrated when I suddenly started giggling and thinking, This will be probably the most UNIMPORTANT part of this planner. Make it easy on yourself. I promptly put them on the top–in exactly the worst place because of the elastic band that holds the book closed. 🙄 Moved them to the left and don’t give a flip if they’re all aligned and perfect. Can’t remember me ever personally being aligned and perfect. This planner and I were made for each other, and I can’t thank its creator, Adam J. Kurtz, enough for being exactly who he is.

Tiny Tuesday!

Not as many pages to shred from this slender journal, but once again, it felt good to let them go. There are still some raw feelings expressed here, but they are truths and lessons I do well to remember, so they can stick around a while. It does help me to read the POV of a woman in the time I’m writing about. Sometimes I forget just how intense the twenties were. The answer: very.

Still watching DVDs in bed until I feel better. =)

Freedom

Many pages from this journal are now gone. This will probably be the first of several similar posts. Shredding is shedding, and shedding is freeing.

Meanwhile, it’s October 1, official beginning of Spooky Season! My fun skeleton, Lord Cuttlebone, is out of the closet and back on the pages of Instagram.

Missing


There is an ever-growing list of things I can’t find. I think my dogs are gaslighting me. I might have to add a candle of St. Anthony (patron saint of lost things) to the Justice and the Songbird. Kidding. This isn’t an altar, but boy does the writing sanctuary smell divine.

In today’s search for what I didn’t find, I turned up three additional years of personal diary pages, so that organization task is still happening.

Dear Diary…

My mother gave me this five-year diary, my first, for Christmas when I was in eighth grade. I think I’ve blogged it before. She wrote a note that says, “To Becky, On Christmas: Don’t ever do anything that you would be ashamed to write in this book—and have me read. Mother.” Ha, and she did read it all the time, even though I tried to hide it in my room.

Because of her ferreting skills, I wrote in code a lot, and I’ve only reread bits and pieces. I was boy-crazy, my mother drove me crazy, my father was deployed in Korea, my sister got married, and I loved music. I wrote consistently for a while the first year, skipped a year, and wrote a little bit in it again the third year, and that third-year stuff is one pissed-off teenager. That’s when my parents made me change schools, and I was miserable.

I enjoy seeing the things I put in the back of this diary, including friends’ phone numbers. I couldn’t provide the phone numbers of anyone in my life today, thanks to the way we use names, not numbers, to call cell phone contacts. But from junior high—Lynne’s, Teresa’s, Tim’s, Riley’s, my own—I can still rattle off those numbers like I was calling them all just yesterday.

Fun fact: Since I can’t remember current-day phone numbers, Tom’s going to have a disk engraved with his phone number to add to the bracelet I always wear (it has my Medic Alert info). If I lock my keys and phone in the car, I’ll know what number to call using someone else’s phone.