I first started writing in a journal when I was in first grade. This journal just consisted of badly misspelled words that told the story of life as a seven year old. However, it was the beginning of a habit that continues today. This is even a manifestation of that habit.
My parents got our first computer when I was in first grade. As I developed my writing and typing skills, I began to type journal entries into it. The handwritten journal entries for school continued through my freshman year. I received my first "real" journal in second grade, and I began to write in that. Sometime in middle school or thereabouts, I began to transfer the handwritten journal entries to the computer. This endeavor began to be a major source of my entertainment at night, as I typed away and spell checked my entries. I had quite the collection of journals from my various classes throughout elementary school, since each class had one. My journal entries took up almost 200 typed pages. However, about the same time as my junior prom, all of this journal gathering came to a halt. In a effort to make our living room look presentable to my prom date (we were in the middle of a remodel, and all of our stuff from our extra bedroom had made its way to our living room), my mom took down the computer desk and the computer. This computer was about ten computers and we had a brand new I-mac, so we didn't really need our ancient Apple computer. Our printer had become non-functional, so I had no way to quickly print out my journals (or all of the other documents we had accumulated over ten years). Plus, we had no way of running our 3 ½ inch floppy disks on our I-mac, and even if we had been able to, our Mac Write program had gone missing.
Over the next approximately nine years, the thought of all of that lost work was in the back of my mind. Not only my journal was on the computer, but also the journals of my mom and grandma, as well as numerous stories I had been working on from the time I was in elementary school. All of this was representative of all the hard work of my mother and I over about ten years. It was quite a bit of work to lose. I wondered if the computer would even work after all of that time.
Well, I got the answer to my question a few weeks ago when we visited my parents. While computers today are much more amazing, computers of twenty years ago are apparently much more durable. Even though it hadn't been used in almost 10 years, the computer started up. The mouse has issues, but it works. You just have to keep it on the down arrow on the side of the document and you are able to scroll. I think one of the hardest things to get used to was the last of right click buttons and the roller button. However, I was so excited to be able to read my journals that I was able to deal with the loss of these "modern conveniences."
I was only able to type for a couple of hours, but I was able to transcribe my journal entries from the first grade and the majority of the second grade. I was one crazy kid. I had quite the over-inflated ego, and it was interesting to see what my 8 year old self found to be the most important events of my day-to-day life. I also found that my first clogging competition was at a high school in the city where I now live. An oil painter who taught the fifth graders how to paint in my mom's classroom apparently also fascinated me. I think I wrote about it four or five times. Who I played with was also important, and apparently my best friend was mad at me a lot (we got over that by high school). I can't wait to go back to my parents to relive my many adventures. Maybe someday I will have somewhere to put the computer in my house so I can work on transcribing the treasures off of it.
It is amazing to me how easily I have forgotten the little things. I have a firm testimony in the importance of journal keeping and record keeping. I enjoy reading about the lives of my ancestors, but I wish they would have written about the menial day to day happenings of their lives. I hope that sometime in the future my descendents will likewise find joy in reading my journals. That will make the hard work of writing, then typing, and now transcribing my journals worth it, but if not, I at least will have the opportunity to laugh over my silliness as a child, and an adult. I still find the me of two or three years ago to be quite silly.
