Documentation and paper trails

Hi, hello, hi.

Human memory is not great. Lots of little facts about my life slip through the cracks, unrecoverable. I can’t tell you what I ate for dinner 3 weeks ago, or what I was doing at specific times. This honestly scares me. That a year from now, all I’ll know about 2022 are vague visions of ghosts of Lilian past.

Record keeping makes me feel marginally better about the ephemeral-ness of experience,¹ but the practice of record keeping, in a way that works for me, is something I’m still figuring out. For instance, I’ve been keeping a bullet journal for a few years, mostly to manage to-do lists and keep track of long term projects. Not so much for journalling, apart from moments when I am loaded with feeling (generally once a month, depending on the moon). Upon rewatching the How to Bullet Journal video recently, I realised I only ever used the tasks bullet “•”, and not the notes or events bullet (“–” and “o” respectively). Thus, as part of new-year-new-me,² I’ll be rapid logging a wider scope of things.

Also part of new-year-new-me is figuring out what I want this website to be. Largely inspired by this walk/birding blog and the Backyard Nature website, I want a place to record events, ideas, and deepdives.

Some time was spent with regards to the structure of the blog. I like the idea of a whole year being on one html file, so that at the end of each year there’s some symbolic manual archiving. I quite like that posts can get lost over time and isn’t so easy to get to. Perhaps I’ll do some sort of manual threading and cross referencing, perhaps not! Perhaps there won’t be a single post after this one! Isn’t the future exciting!

List of post ideas:

• baby product marketing aesthetics
• potato soup recipe
• crows