Wow, that was cathartic.

Over the past few weeks, I've let my room get intolerably messy. Never unhygienic or grubby, mind you--just wildly disorganized. Last night, I sorted all the stuff piling up in the middle of the room and started in on the teetering stacks of papers and books atop my dresser. Soon I won't wince when I look at the state of my room! Huzzah!

In the process, I found a bunch of stray papers and mementos that I never got around to putting in The Book. Chances are, if you know me in Real Life, you know about The Book. It's a combination scrapbook/sketchbook/notebook that never leaves my side. It's about 5.5"x4", earning it a permanent place in my purse.

I never write captions or blurbs for the things I put in. It's like a way of documenting the noteworthy (and occasionally mundane) moments in my life that only I can completely decipher. Ticket stubs and playbills and autographs and newspaper articles are self-explanatory, but only I can provide the backstory for the little flower bloom pressed between the pages, given to me by a random Greek woman on the first day of Chungy's and my first day in Spetses. And I love to get creative with the things I put in. Items flip up to reveal other treasures beneath, and newspaper articles fold out accordion-style to accommodate the full text. All in all, they represent a significant investment of time and memory.

But for whatever reason, I've barely touched the Book in months. This is really unlike me. I've kept an incarnation of the Book since March 2003, and my first Book was filled in a little over a year. This latest Book--with a few odd exceptions--hadn't been added to since May 2008. I actually had some ticket stubs swimming around unscrapbooked from 2007.

It's understandable why I wouldn't take the time to chronicle my life during summer 2008, because frankly, I didn't have a life. I spent practically every waking hour either at work or cooped up in my apartment, recovering from work. That was around the time my blogging tapered off, too. And as the backlog of stuff I wanted to add to the book piled up, resistance mounted to add anything new before I'd tackled it. I always feel so weird about blogging minutiae when I have a massive "event" post in the works, like the one I'm composing for ConDFW. It's like I stifle myself, because I don't want anything that happens chronologically after the event to be blogged/scrapbooked before. I guess the same goes for the Book.

Yes, I am a nerd.

So I spent an hour last night bringing the Book up to date, using all my ingenuity to fit mementos in the scant page space allotted to them chronologically. Hopefully, I've taken away any excuse not to blog or Book-chronicle. I love being able to look back through past Books and my blog archive and remember how I felt during those experiences. Now I need to get back in the swing of documenting my existence!

Labels: das book, metablogging