My Journal Trek

If there's anything about which I can honestly say, “I'm the expert,” it has to be journal writing. When I tell people how many journals I have, the short answer is “more than 40.” The long answer is, well, long.

This is my Journal Trek.

One December evening, when I was three months shy of turning 10 years old, I noticed my mother had been keeping a journal. I don't know where the desire came from—whether it was because I was my mother's son, because I've always loved writing or because I was a kid who wanted what someone else had—but suddenly I wanted one, too. It was late enough at night in a small town that there wasn't a snowball’s chance in Hades I’d be able to buy one anywhere that night. But instead of reassuring that she’d go buy one the next day, she retrieved an extra, unused journal from her room and gave it to me. Fueled by instant gratification, I wrote almost a full page that night for my very first journal entry.

I made the commitment to write in it once a week—every Monday night. As tedious tasks tend to do when you’re a kid, my commitment eventually started eroding away. It became a self-inflicted chore. I would write randomly about things important to me as a kid, such as the latest Nintendo games, losing at whatever, and being picked on in school. Eventually I got so sick of writing that instead of merely quitting I started “cheating”—for several pages, I wrote large letters that covered several lines at a time. It culminated with one page filled with nothing but “Nothing happened. And nothing ever will!”

Because it was an intuitive obligation, I never actually gave it up. After that page, I started taking it a little more seriously. I wrote here and there and confined my writing to one line at a time (as you do). Then in high school, as a sophomore at North Fremont High School in Ashton, Idaho, my journal writing officially became a hobby the night of my first date.

While only a sophomore, I weaseled my way into the Prom by asking a senior—my best friend’s oldest sister. I was fortunate enough to be part of a date group with juniors and seniors I looked up to—two of whom, I had noticed during play practices earlier in the year, were avid journal writers. I took them as examples and decided to make my first date eternally memorable. Prior to leaving for the dance, I sat on my bed and wrote five pages about the day’s excursions—more than I had ever written before in one sitting. That wasn't even the dance itself. When I finished writing about that entire day, it covered eight pages. From then on, entries became pages long because I felt the need to include as many details as possible, even for events more mundane than the Prom.

At least until I became an adult and started learning the meaning of the word “busy.”

While serving an honorable full-time mission for the LDS Church in southern California in the late 1990’s, I became so busy 14 months into my two-year service that I abandoned the longhand journal and took up a tape recorder. I recorded entries night and morning for 10 months—to the day. I resumed writing in longhand journals after returning to Idaho, but it eventually came to a dead halt in March of 2010. Halfway through Journal #40 (which didn't include the longhand journal I kept the first 14 months of my mission), the pain of writing longhand convinced me to use a website called LDSJournal.com. That website tragically died in May of this year by starvation (i.e., lack of advertising).

Since then, Microsoft Word has been my official journal medium, but even that needs an asterisk.

Since adulthood, I've gotten into a vicious cycle of getting behind and catching up. I usually catch up but then get progressively further and further behind. At this point, it has been years since I've been current on my official journal keeping. Every day I write notes in a journal notebook, with the intention I’ll type them up in my official journal; however, as of right now, I've only made it to May of 2013. I also have a hole in the summer of 2009 because I haven’t transferred those notes to a journal yet. I also haven’t finished writing journal notes from about a week of travelling last month.   

And then there's my missionary cassette tapes from the last 10 months of my mission, which I call my “missionary book” (not missionary journal). After being confined to audio form for four years, I took an Oral History course at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and obtained a Sony industrial transcribing machine. With it, over the course of several years, I single-handedly transcribed every single hour I had recorded in 10 months—36 hours on 27 cassettes—and edited, added end notes, proofed, and formatted it in Adobe InDesign. As of right now, it needs to be indexed, proofed one last time, and then published.

So because I don’t have enough writing to do, I’m going to do some “Journal Trekking” on this blog site. Every so often, I’ll publish excerpts from publicly available journals, as well as my own and my paternal grandfather’s journal notes.

What’s your Journal Trek?