Out of wanting something that might even remotely help me in keeping tabs of how far I’ve come in learning the things that interest me, I rummaged through the drawers in search of anything that would rise up to my needs. At the top of the plastic bags that neatly categorized one class of paper to the next – from the leaves of yellow pads to the packs of construction paper I used in art class back in high school – I found a little notebook, its pages yellowed out, presumably, it seemed, carelessly thrown inside as though someone had rushed to hide it as someone was approaching. I turned the cover, flipped through the pages out of innocence: I realized it was a diary.
My diary.
I probably left a huge gap on my previous blog at the end of 2006 leading to the first quarter of 2007, as the written entries were dated from December to January of the said years. It felt a bit surreal.
Of course, there’s the usual things, albeit they’ve been done in a slightly different fashion: bullet-pointed metaphors and hasty little scribbles that probably suggests what they faintly mean, all capped under a bold-faced highlighted title. There were the things that blew me away – those that made me recall how fascinated I was with the French, from the titles that ranged from itineraré to trés raison – and those that were outright weird. It seems I’ve despised this particular someone since second year, though I’ve always imagined that I only learned to hate him last term; he’s been arrogant from day one, apparently, and been wanting to outshine everyone else at the outset of everything.
But it’s the littler details that really caught my attention. On the first page, for example, it quickly became obvious that I was on the second term of our second year in the university, as it made mention of my itineraries for a given week. At the top of the thirteenth, it read:
PENDING: Integral Calculus, integration formulas and transformation.
Physics, mechanisms of heat transfer and the first law of thermodynamics
Philosophy, modifiers and the principle of double effect [ test on January 10, 2007 ]
There were checkmarks and crosses, beneath a header that said STATUS, teeny additions to a list as the day progressed, and lists that went on for a good two pages or so.
A couple of days ago, I told Niko I felt as though I’ve barely accomplished anything. Today, I realized it just might be possible that I’ve never been more misinformed.
From the day the last entry was made up to today, I’ve lost something, I guess.
I realized I’m a memory buff, though I don’t mean it in the sense I’m the sort of guy who has a knack for remembering things that everyone else has forgotten. I mean I figured I’m the sort of guy who holds on to anything that’d remind me of the past. I’ve been keeping letters I shared with some of my high school friends in a neat box on my closet for four years now, refuses to delete quotes on my inbox unless the memory stick fails me, or deletes them but only if I’ve been able to transfer it onto another notebook. On that respect, I guess I’m that sentimental.
But on the other, I always wanted to see how much I’ve accomplished from a given point. What spurred this entry, in the first place, was a product of that wanting, after all. I’m a sucker for posterity.
From a society that demands things to be done from an eight-to-five shift, admittedly, life’s been a rush, really. It seems we’ve been programmed to measure our success in two discrete steps, the intermediates somehow getting disregarded. Yet why is it that we’ll always look at the bigger things, without appreciating the little steps we’ve taken to get there, when they’re probably every bit as important?
