I spent far too much of 2024 following the news and took a much needed break a couple of months ago. A total blackout on television and almost nothing leaks through online. My mood has noticeably improved.
I’ve reached the stage of life — philosophically, geographically, and financially — where very little that happens in the world touches my life in any meaningful way. (Yes, I know, good for you, Steve.)
Bottom line: I’m much happier not following world (or local for that matter) events. Not knowing, if you will. And it turns out, if there is anything I really need to know, someone will call or text me: “Have you heard?” Hasn’t happened yet.
Following my most recent chat (see below) with GPT, I flashed on the idea of a blog where each post was a conversation with my favorite… artificial entity. (I assume this is already being done). Every post would be a transcript of one of these chats. Or, if I were really ambitions, I could post the audio.
I don’t need another blog to tend to so I’ve decided to just post these conversations (I can’t think of them any other way) here in their own category. Don’t see how these could be more boring than My Dinner with Andre, the 1981 film directed by Louis Malle.
I’ve got a thing about calendars. That’s not quite right. I’ve got a thing about remembering when things happened. I’m not good at that, even important stuff. My primary objective in starting this blog was to have some place I could write things down and find them later. Favorite lines from movies or a TV show. Excerpts from books. I keep a pen handy when ready a book so I can underline favorite passages and/or make notes in the margins. Did this mostly in novels but as I started reading more non-fiction, I found those books tended to get more notation. When I finished the book I transcribed those passages to a file and saved them. Once I started blogging those notes became blog posts. (Index page)
In my younger —pre-web— years, my notes were written or typed. I wasn’t very consistent with my journals but I did manage to save mosts of them (now as PDFs)
When I started working at Learfield Communications in 1984 I had to keep a calendar. This is my desk calendar from June of that year, my first full month on the job. If you hover over a date you might see the entry. I quickly moved to a spiral-bound calendar.
And eventually to the Day-Timer Calendar (of various sizes). I used those for the next few years, even after we had computers on our desktops.
I started using Google Calendar when it launched in the summer of 2009 and used it for almost everything, linking to relevant files (pdf, jpg, mov) in Google Drive. Google Calendar quickly became my daily diary.
In November of 2014 — a couple of years after I retired— I decided to get rid of a shelf-full of Day-Timers to make room for books. Before burning them I went through each day from 1984 to 1999, creating a corresponding entry in my Google Calendar. Flipping through those old pages brought back some physical sensations. A little stomach clinch over some bad news… tightness in the neck muscles as some unpleasantness unfolded. As I recall, this process took weeks going day-by-day, week-by-week.
I included the word “reprise” in the title of this post because I just completed this process for the second time. A few weeks back I made the decision to migrate from Google apps to the Apple ecosystem. Email, calendar, cloud file storage…everything. I want to be able to take advantage of “Apple Intelligence” when it comes along later this year or early next. I want Apple apps to have access to all of my data.
“Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word ‘speed’ (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary.”
My calendar is now as complete a history of my last 30 years as I’ll ever have. And I enjoy having it. Being able to find stuff that I had forgotten existed.
“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past. […] You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”
If you care about your thoughts, keep them. Exactly.
“You don’t become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool.”
