I Didn't Keep A Good Diary Either

You'd think that when January 1 rolled around, I'd be going crazy with the blog posts, fueled by the promise of New Year's resolutions.  That's not what happened, of course.  Inspiration is feast or famine.  Some days, I can't sleep because of all of the ideas frantically swimming around in my brain.  On other days, the well is dry.  January began with a string of the latter.

I guess I should not be surprised.  It is all a recurring pattern.  Before the days of blogging, Facebooking, and Twittering, we had the old-fashioned outlet of keeping a diary.  Movies, shows, and books would have us believe that keeping a diary is/was a common practice, probably because it almost always serves as a convenient plot device.  (Last week's episode of "Ugly Betty," for example, featured Betty's diary as evidence that she has felt passion (most notably for the Hanson brothers (sadly, I think she meant the band, not the awesome hockey thugs made famous in the cult classic "Slapshot")).)  But is that really life?

It's not that I didn't try to keep a diary.  I distinctly recall a Strawberry Shortcake diary with a gold colored latch on it.  And later, a Ramona Quimby diary that even tried to help me with prompts like "It made me mad when ..."  I'm pretty sure the Strawberry Shortcake model's only action was in opening and shutting the latch, like the nervous habit of clicking a ball point pen with no intention of using it to actually write.  Ramona Quimby had about five entries but was retired with little fanfare, like the poor Trapper Keeper with the picture of the hot air balloon that lived in the bottom of my desk drawer for 95% of my sixth grade school year.

I guess that's why some people save things like school papers and bulletins and playbills and movie stubs.  That's why we listen to 80's on 8 on Sirius radio.  Because we don't all have diaries to jog our memories when we want to pay a little visit to the way we used to be.  And those are the next best things ...