Diaries

 

July 3, 1994: my very first diary entry! I was in high school, during a time when slam books and diaries were common. I remember purchasing my first diary from a store called "National Bookstore", which was my go-to school supplies and bookstore. Like my peers, I had a stash of stationery (including those cheap perfumed ones), envelopes, pens, or stickers (to seal my letters) since writing notes or letters was a popular pastime. My high school class is about to celebrate our silver jubilee (unbelievable how time flies--though mind you, we were not in the K-12 system then). Part of this celebration involves a fundraiser for the benefit of mission schools in my home country (ang Republika ng Pilipinas) through a special undated daily devotional journal with reflections contributed by some of my batchmates. I think it's a fantastic idea which was why I purchased a few copies for myself and as gifts. A journal is certainly very representative of who we were as a class--a generation of teenagers who enjoyed handwritten notes and carried a filofax organizer (see Wikipedia entry here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filofax). Truth be told, I still keep a daily agenda--mostly for work or appointments. There are calendar applications on the web, but I still keep something physical. When I write something on a daily planner or agenda, I'm more likely to remember it. Or if I don't remember the thing I wrote, I will remember that I wrote something down which will lead me to that thing that I wrote down.

Compared to the 90s, I write about my day much differently now--this blog is a less literal expression of things I want to occasionally capture about my daily life rather than a "Dear Diary" sort of thing. The point of this post is that I may revert back to that "Dear Diary" sort of thing through the daily devotional journal from my high school class. BUT it will not begin with "Dear Diary" nor will it have many trivial things in it (such as what I ate for lunch). Maybe a single important thing per day that is worth writing about. A little noteworthy fact about the daily devotional journal I have is that it has empty sections for "I am grateful for" and "Lord, I pray that"...what a beautiful way to examine one's daily life. Socrates once said that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

This doesn't imply that I will end this blog; it is, after all, a journal of sorts, isn't it? You may notice that I've added some Google AdSense here, but honestly, I have received zero-nil-zilch monetary benefits thus far (and that's since 2006!). So, you, my sparse readers can understand that this is meant more for capturing important thoughts than for anything  else. It may seem like a form of aggrandizement since it is publicly accessible, yet the truth is that this platform has a greater potential for longevity than paper. I just wish I knew how to save the contents. 

To end this post on a funny, nostalgic note...here's the inner front cover of my first diary with pasted cut-outs of celebrities I obviously had a crush on during that time. And by posting this, I am subjecting myself to various forms of judgment. Come on, I was a teenager. It was the 90s.

Here you go, presenting clockwise from the top: Joshua Jackson, Hugh Grant, Stephen Gately, and Scott Wolf. I was surprised that I didn't paste cut-outs of Brendan Fraser and Will Friedle....and if you're wondering where I got these, these were most likely from those Bop or Smash Hits magazines.

Since we're talking about diaries, how about listening to Bread's "Diary"?...Too much? Hah.