~✎~✎~ WRITING STUFF DOWN ~✎~✎~ 
    
    A short(?) retrospective on note-taking and journal-keeping.

    So far, the only things I’ve written about on my website are about my site itself and about what I want to write about on my website. I thought maybe I’d write about my writing journey and how I got to this point. Maybe it will help me organize some thoughts along the way. 

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        ———> YOUTH. <———

    I could skip all the way to when college when I started actually developing a writing system for myself, which I suppose is what this is all about, but that would cut out a lot of the pretext. I would say I was influenced very early on by my family that in a lot of ways lead to my writing habits. For starters, I was an avid reader by middle school. My parents did a great job encouraging good reading habits, and my siblings and I would take regular trips to the library together as soon as Kennadie would have had her license. I was also subscribed to Highlights Kids and Sports Illustrated Kids magazines. That eventually turned into Sports Illustrated and Alternative Press subscriptions, and these introduced me to journalism as a medium. Nowadays a large chunk of what I write about is reflecting back on things I read recently. 

    On top of all my reading engagements, I was also surrounded by quality stationary supplies. My grandpa always had a seemly endless supply of Pentel mechanical pencils and erasers. He would supply our house with sticky notes and note pads. My mom was always very fond of Sharpie markers. This all rubbed off on me in different ways that helped shaped my early interest in writing tools and supplies. It didn’t end with just writing utensils either, I was always fairly intrigued by a nice quality journal. I probably had several throughout my teen years that I intended to write they ended up sitting in my room, empty, until I guess I lost them all one way or another. 

    So I made comic books with my friends. I typed out short stories on Microsoft Word on the family computer. I took writing seriously throughout middle and high school. I kept a dream journal as a teenager. I also had a “one sentence a day” book that I kept up with for a few years. I wrote poetry and eventually that evolved into writing music with my friends. I tinkered with social media sites and writing platforms like Blogger or Wordpress. I remember nights when I would think very deeply about having some sort of blog about music or sports someday, but I guess I didn’t know how to act upon it so it mostly fizzled out after just fidgeting with various iOS applications. I wrote a lot of stuff down. And I suppose I would have kept notes on my phone, too, but I don’t think I had any meaningful notes to take until close to graduating high school. 

    Without realizing it, I started developing my own personal writing system for organizing all my thoughts and documenting the ones I want to keep forever. In the beginning this mostly meant just having a daily planner or agenda. I would always keep my tasks in bullet points throughout high school and college. It also meant starting to keep my personal notes in list form on my phone and starting to actually utilize all of these concepts in my day to day life rather than just for school. 


        —> PENCILS. <—

    Towards the end of college, I started to become particularly interested in pencils and other stationary supplies, but mostly pencils. I was also quite fond of the Pilot G2 pens throughout school but I didn’t have a real opinion on any other stationary supplies up to that point. I wish I could say I had some real reason like I had something worth writing down in the moment but I believe I just read a post online about pencil sharpener brands and wanted to try them out for myself. It sounded like a satisfying thing to fidget with and a small collection of pencils sounded fun to experiment with. The problem is, there’s only one way to experiment with pencils, and that’s to write with them. 

    So I went down to the local art store supply shop here and bought a pack of Viking pencils and a Kum sharpener. I took them home and sharpened probably two or three of them. Then I put them in my desk drawer and didn’t touch them for at least a whole year. Like I said, I didn’t necessarily have any plans to write anything at first. I liked the idea of writing more than I did the action of it. I’m not sure what the next real turning point was, but eventually I kept buying more pencils and notebooks to go with them and I eventually convinced myself to actually start keeping journals and start writing stuff down. I started reading more and then keeping notes for everything I read and then I added a couple diary type journals; one more open-styled journal for random thoughts and entries about life, and another daily log of stuff being done and kept up around the house and with Peachy. I am still not consistent enough with any of these journals as much as I’d like to be but in the last year I have made a lot of progress getting them all together and getting them started. I’ve also finally gotten a decent amount of usage out of a good chunk of my pencil collection. 

        —> SPREADSHEETS. <—

    For some reason how I began transferring and centralizing all of my daily notes into Google Sheets is kind of a blur to me, even though it was just a couple years ago. I don’t believe I started using sheets at all until working my current job which I got hired into in June of 21. I always knew about Google Sheets of course throughout school but I never used it seriously for my personal data or lists or anything like that. We use it everyday at work and I started just building my own personal hub of notes to keep myself on top of things and it just grew from there. I started becoming more pc-oriented in life as well, hoping to learn more about computers and also cut down on my phone usage, so sheets became a really convenient tool for me. 

    Ideally I would choose not to use Google Sheets so much for obvious reasons (Google bad) but I have no real option. I try to use Obsidian for all the notes that I can, but I need spreadsheets sometimes. Everyone does. The world runs on spreadsheets. You might not like hearing this but some very important systems in this world are held together by some dumbass spreadsheets that have been passed down from employee to employee for the last (I was about to type 25 years until I knew that had to be naively off of the mark so I looked up when Excel came out and lol) 40 years. It is sheet after sheet of maxed out rows of Excel that bind our society together. So anyways, sometimes I need a spreadsheet, and I’d like to access it on my work computer conveniently and at home and preferably on my phone as well. The only people who offer this, I believe paid or free, is Google. Thankfully it’s free, the only catch is none of my data is private and Google has their eyes all over it all the time. I’m sure there are some random maybe even open source projects out there with cloud based web browser spreadsheets but I’m sure they may cost actual money and most likely don’t support mobile yet. My best bet is probably using Obsidian plug-ins but I’ve dabbled with it and I’m just pretty sure it won’t come close to the mobile experience Google Sheets provides. 

    I started out using sheets for the daily to do lists and things like that but I eventually started using it to organize my entire life to the point where now I’m not sure how I kept anything in check before I did it this way. I also don’t know how anyone lives life without doing something of this extent but I’m sure most people have a decent amount of notes on their iPhones, right? If not, where do you keep all your thoughts? I simply have too many to keep all together and organized and I needed to write things down. I kept my daily to-do list, my bookmarked sites, my reading list, and then eventually a huge organized list of everything we needed for when we bought our house. I still have a nice organized sheet for our expenses that I keep running, and again, this is something that sheets was made to do and I simply don’t have another tool to do it so perfectly. I also keep my bookmarks there still, but mainly because of the ease of access from all of my different platforms and work stations, as I also previously mentioned. My reading list is also still hanging around there because it’s very detailed but I could move it over to Obsidian with everything else. Which leads me to my current writing system. 


        —> CHAOS?. <—

    After a few years of tweaking a couple note-keeping systems for myself I finally realized I’m never going to be able to centralize it all into one place like one big spreadsheet or anything, I have too many things I like to keep track of. I accepted a chaotic system where my thoughts are all over the place and I’m forcing myself to ok with that. I keep most of my daily notes with Obsidian these days, and hopefully they stay there forever but history here has shown that simply probably will not be the case. Then I still do have my sheets for the specific cases I need them for, I have my physical journals mostly for keeping reading notes and logs, and I have my website which I have designated for specific write-ups on various topics like this one. 

    For now, I will continue experimenting will of these different platforms and figuring out exactly what I think is worth continuing to document and then figuring out what medium I want to document it on. □