Thursday, 07 December 2006 | Calendar girl

When I was in high school, I started writing down almost everything I did. Everything! I made a note whenever I ate a meal, played Ms. Pac-Man after class, or cut holes in the knees of my jeans. It didn't matter if an activity happened daily (such as eating breakfast), it got added to the list regardless.

I didn't write about how I felt about any of the activities; my list was in the present tense and very matter-of-fact, as if my notes were imperatives: Eat bkfst. Pick up Clyda. Drive to school.

I kept a separate journal for feelings, and the two components never met. (I liked the idea that I was made up of these two disparate elements -- facts and feelings -- kind of like opposing hemispheres of the brain, working both together and separately.)

The weird thing is, I recorded all of my activities on my wall calendar, which provided very little room for such an exercise. And the longer I kept up the practice, the more detailed my notes became. However, rather than keeping my lists in a notebook, where I'd have unlimited space, my handwriting shrunk, and I abbreviated my notes into my own self-styled shorthand.

I kept up this practice for almost four years, without missing a day. In fact, at one point I could tell, with vague accuracy, how I'd spent any day in the previous two years, without even checking my calendar. Not a particularly useful talent, but something that probably made me feel in touch with my life, or that I was steering the ship, or something.

Unfortunately, my obsessiveness was incompatibly paired with a tendency to procrastinate. Sometimes I would go a full two weeks without updating my calendar, forcing me to investigate my own life to determine what I'd done, checking receipts and calling friends to see when exactly we'd hung out. (The internet would've been a great help here, had it been around then.) The thought of confusing the dates -- or worse, having blank spaces on my calendar -- was upsetting to me, so I did everything I could to ensure that my notes were correct. Ultimately, my plan was to quit writing on my calendar altogether as soon as I lost a day, which is eventually what happened.

Lately, perhaps in the absence of doing any writing, I've started listing activities again; I'm into my fifth month of detailed daily records. (My methods have changed somewhat; I've gone electronic, and I only provide daily highlights, rather than all the yawn-inducing trivia.)

I'm not sure why I feel compelled to do it, other than that I suspect it makes me feel grounded, because it provides me with an overview of how I spend my time and gives me a little more distance from my life. It's nice getting a glimpse of the bigger picture, despite that the activity only requires me to focus on details. (If you pile up enough details and step away from them, you can begin to see [sometimes surprising] patterns.) Mostly, though, I think I just like memory.