with a twist

[elvendoll]

there's a meme to do something similar that i've been doing anyways...

four years ago today i was feeling rather nonplussed and unsatisfied, pondering health/nutrition, and having my wanderlust resparked. a quote:

so far, i am leaning towards taking summer courses and then getting a full time job in September, while taking one or 2 night classes.... but the idea of taking off for the voyage in may, not setting a time-limit on it, and then finding a job when i get back is also tempting...

three years ago tomorrow, i had an awkward night at the club - not being able to find my niche and feeling uncomfortable around people:

and i never felt comfortable enough to just socialize aside from watching one of the skits with c. i was actually almost surprised when he grabbed my hand and dragged me to the front of the stage... its been a while since we've hung out & talked... and i guess i just took that as a sign. which dosn't even mean that this was nothing more then randomness - my mind just overanalyzes a bunch.

two years ago today all i said was "i've had a very good couple of days : )" ; )

a year ago tomorrow i did one of these, talked about the wonderful anniversary weekend sol3 and i had:

overall, it ranks up there with the arizona trips and was the most relaxed i've felt in at least a year, and probably much longer then that.

and wrote about some mundane stuffs...

and i will probably write about yesterday soon - but for now, it suffices to say that the memories still make me grin : )

Comments

[iluxa.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure, but i think we've discussed this with you a bit - the issue that things written in lj spark up for a while, and then sink into oblivion forever.

it seems that these posts of past entries that you make are an important way for your to keep some perspective and continuity on your life. however, it seems you usually limit your reactions only to the socio-historical commentary of what you were doing - what impact the events had on your life then and how it relates to your life now. (this is just my view from reading some of them, i may be quite wrong, of course.)

do you ever feel like maybe there needs to be better ways to connect with the ideas and emotions you were experiencing and perhaps recording then, assuming that some of them may be just as relevant today? i find that livejournal (and all blogs, essentially) is an amazing tool at inspiring self-reflection and some measure of creativity (well, maybe it's just that i've been more bored than usual at work). however, all these tools are quite poor at enabling continous exploration of the ideas, and make it quite difficult to revisit them and follow-up without quite a lot of effort. (For instance, it's easy to look up what you wrote on this day 4,3,2,1 years ago, but to browse through the evolution of your idea about a certain subject, would be almost impossible.)

i mean, it's normal that much of the stuff you wrote a while ago isn't quite as relevant to you now. but it seems that lj and blogs exacerbate the situation by explicitly forcing a chronological-only view.

Well, quite a rant that came out. Care to comment? Do you think something like this would be worth-while? Specifically, would you make use of a tool that helped you revisit your older writings? would it perhaps encourage you to write more timeless general-appeal entries if you knew you could easily retrieve them and follow up on them?

and most importantly, do you think there is actually enough time-insensitive content being generated on lj, and perhaps in other blogs, that would warrant such a change in access to the content?

(Reason I solicited your comment is because you seem to cultivate strong connections to the past, on lj and otherwise.)

[elvendoll.livejournal.com]

i think LJ does provide a way to look up back entries thematically - the memories function. i use it minimally, to ensure that entries i may want to point to later are easy to find, while some people use it much more extensively.

my journaling has been of very low quality of late - somewhere between being busy and going through alternating 'i don't want to make myself vulnerable' and 'i don't feel like sharing' moods has cut into the content i put here.
eventually, i need to sit down, reevaluate my motivations for journalling and then sink my teeth in again - after that, i'd imagine there's going to be more depth to everyday, and the catching-up entries...

[iluxa.livejournal.com]

hmm... ok..

yeah, memories to provide this functionality, but i find it's kind-of quite limited. and i have a feeling that it could be made more intuitive and be made more useful while requiring less explicit interaction from the user. or rather, it's not so much that i have very solid ideas on how to do it, but i at least think that this is a definite problem that needs addressing. it may help different kinds of writers and lj-ers keep track of a lot more content if there were better sysytems.

as for the sharing - yeah, i feel that. sometimes you just don't want to share. but that's the thing, i think i would write a lot more private entries if i knew there is a good usable way for me to get back to them later. there is of course a way to get back to everything, but i feel like the tools themselves encourage certain types of interaction versus others. and perhaps it's for the better - this is supposed to model a paper-based journal originally, and it kind-of does. i just think i could benefit a lot from tools that would encourage me to do more digging in my past thoughts. and was wondering if you feel the same way.

[elvendoll.livejournal.com]

i think LJ could use a search function - but, there are utilities that let you download your journal into a searchable file.

beyond that, i guess i see it like this - the memory function provides a useful, fairly easy and convenient way of filing entries - you can create as many topics as you like, and assign multiple topics to one entry. i don't believe i utilize the function to the extent that i could, therefore i see not filing entries as my fault, rather then the fault of the product.
if i were to use the memory feature more frequently/thoroughly and found issue with it, i'd look into ways of getting enhanced functionality - which is just the long way of saying that i can't picture something that would motivate me to use such functionality.

[iluxa.livejournal.com]

gotcha. i think maybe i should make more use of the memory functionality myself before i start looking for too many faults with it. and yes, as with anything, it's always a trade-off of how much effort you put into it versus how useful it will be.

one of the reasons why i think of ideas for tools to organize this kind of stuff is because i don't have quite enough intellectual discipiline to really put in the work that's required to straighten all my thoughts out myself. but on the flip side, i feel that such tools would help not only me with this process but others as well, if they were to be created.

anyway, thank you for your input. i've replied to the thread in iarwain's journal. i don't know if you get email notification of it, though.

[elvendoll.livejournal.com]

ps. i'm still hoping to get a response from you in the dialogue started in iarwain's journal...