I've changed the description under my blog title. Since my creative writing class ended this blog has been banging around, trying to find something useful to do with itself. I don't really have a profession, and no clearly focused passions. I do, however, have a compelling need to document events, thoughts, and observations in my life. I document in handwritten notebooks, in letters and e-mails, in word documents I type to myself, and in this blog. I like the quote Josh Corey has up over at Cahiers de Corey by Jorgen Leth: "A notebook is an improvement in the art of living."

I know that keeping notes is an improvement in the art of living for me, but is it for everyone? Isn't it sort of obsessive-compulsive? Something my modern dance teacher said about scrapbooking resonates. We were driving to a costume fitting and she told me about her friends who had recently discovered scrapbooking. They had started throwing weekly scrapbooking parties and had acquired all of the foofy papers and scissors that serious scrapbooking requires. My dance teacher didn't understand the point of her friends' newfound passion. She thought it was a waste to spend time putting zig-zag edged frames and bows around memories instead of getting out and making new ones. I sometimes feel the same way about all the time I spend figuring out how to word something just so, for just the right effect. Maybe I'd do better to get on with the business of three-dimensional living.

I think serious scrapbookers have a deep need to catalogue their memories, and to catalogue them in an aesthetically pleasing way. Don't we all have a need for evidence that our lives are worth living? Scrapbookers go about it by having books full of beautiful memories. Writing helps me feel like I'm learning from each day, that each day has yielded some new knowledge, understanding, or feeling that will be of some use or importance in the future. People like my modern dance teacher maybe get the same evidence in a less tangible way, in their vision of the impact they have on the people and the environment around them, in validation from friends and coworkers, in a sense of self-worth and growth that doesn't need to be written down or to have construction paper pasted around it. For people like that, taking the time to write notes about the day or to catalogue memories might be more onerous than it would be benificial.

So why this blog? Without a community or information the general public is interested in, this space is most like an open, private notebook. Only since it's open I can't write things I don't want the whole world knowing and I have to make more effort to keep it cohesive (and it probably means I should start using spell check). If i'm completely honest I think I've kept with it because this is my way of seeking validation of my worth as a writer. And why do I need that? Maybe so I can tip the balance from pointing to a plant ecologist who writes to a writer who does plant ecology to pay the bills.