other notes

I have to write things down. I really have to. In my eyes, no thought is worth having unless I've put in type or on paper. I guess the fear is that, if I don't, I'll lose it. It'll go and no one will ever get to see that thought and it will be forgotten. It's a kind of narcissism I suppose, to assume that my thoughts are so important, but it's just what I do.

We all have our notebooks, our blogs, diaries, whatever. The compulsion to scribble is in no way related to me. It only gets weird in classes, lectures and stuff. I can't stop taking notes. I just can't. Every good student knows to show up with a pen and paper, lest they forget what's being said to them, but when you find yourself trying to transcribe whole chunks of speech into your Pukka Pad it's time to take a step back.

The real issue here is not the volume of notes, but the different kinds of notes. I didn't realise it until today, but my margins are strange places to be today. In one of the Terry Pratchett books, he talks about the most interesting thing about people being what they write in their margins. It's so true. Going through all my Space Body Design notes, I find these bits, these odd little nuggets. When I'm typing up the draft of my logbook, I file these things under 'other notes', which means that I'm sure I wrote them for a reason but I'm not entirely sure how relevant they are.

On the page right next to my computer, the notes in the margins and at the top go like this:
Professional and personal are different things.
Strength without sensitivity is useless.
I can understand these. As self-contained thoughts they make sense but they bear absolutely no relation to the notes on the page and I really can't remember why I thought it so important that I write them down. Then there's other ones, ones that make no sense at all.
You have to understand.
A cup of tea that he will never drink.
It works better in blue.

Other ones, personal ones, are invariably the ones that people end up seeing:
I'm sitting on my own because everyone hates me in here.
I don't like how vulnerable I looked last night.
The laziness is winning today.
Why are there so many stupid people on this degree?
I hate her face...
Sometimes, just scribbles. I'll write each word on top of the one before so it's an indecipherable mass of ink. So good to do, but so impossible to figure out later. I do this when I know someone's reading over my shoulder.

The other kind of notes I've been making are here, on my blog. It didn't really occur to me that this here site is already a logbook of what I've been doing. I couldn't remember what I'd done in this particular class so I looked back through and found the date, read the posts from that week and figured it out. That was the weekend that Steph and I went to London, prayed in Trafalgar Square, went to see Chris in Chalk Farm. And I remember I spent the day complaining that my legs hurt. Which means it was the Friday that I did my legs in, which was the Friday that we first did the standing sequence, and me and my partner kept balancing our weight wrongly so I hurt myself.

And then I remember that week two was the week that we first went to the Buttoned Down Disco, which I must have blogged about, so I go into the ol' archive and find that week, and find this post, and find my logbook entry as good as written for me.

It's moments like this that I'm so very glad I do this. By this I mean not just blogging, but this whole thing, this compulsion to scribble down absolutely every thought I have. Every quote, every soundbite and question, every event and date and line of poetry that drifts in my ears and through my head, I have to get it down or there's no point in me thinking it. It's why I blog so much, why my notepads look like bombsites, why it takes me hours and hours to read a simple play because of all the scribbling.

It's frustrating, annoying, a bit embarassing. But I can do that, y'know, I can go back to October the 17th or May the 25th or whenever and know exactly what I was thinking then. It's worth the weird looks I get when people read over my shoulder, just for that.