Last Last Weekend
Starting in late January, every week but one in 2018 I wrote a post that summarized my Last Weekend. As the original post stated, this was an experiment, although nearly a year later I can't recall why I thought I should conduct the experiment. The series started as a "top 3" of the weekend, but by April it had turned into more of a summary of the weekend activities. This was the first series of extended post where my journal actually tended toward diary-like posts.
As with most of my yearly projects, I learned some interesting things while writing the series.
[A] I actually do a lot of things on the weekends. One of my friends who read some of the posts said my life sounded exhausting. And all that's despite spending 4 hours or so every Sunday at the radio station, which means I'm cramming even more into the rest of the time.
[B] I still eat out way too much. Excluding vacations, the vast majority of the times I ate out were on weekends, and very often I was eating out more than once a weekend. I guess it's good that I can afford to do so, but some part of my brain feels like this is not the best use of my money.
[C] For someone like me who has trouble remembering restaurant names, being able to say, "oh yeah, we went out with so and so on the weekend, let me look up where we ate" is very weirdly helpful. Just last Saturday night I pulled up the name of the Battery Park Pub for a friend who just moved to that area.
[D] I feel like my short term memory got better at holding all of the weekend events in my brain until it was written down. That probably isn't true and certainly can't be measured objectively, but it does feel that way.
[E] I can't help but note that my diary posts were more of a "what I did" then a "what was going on in the world." This is interesting mostly because I certainly have regular conversations about current events with people, especially in the run up to the mid-term election, but it did not occur to me to log even that those conversations occurred, let alone what they were.
With all that said, I think it's time to retire this series. The main reason for this is that the vast majority of my non travel weekends were fundamentally the same. We went out for dinner, I did errands, I consumed media, I did radio. Sometimes I donated platelets or took my aunt out to lunch. Rinse, wash and repeat. You can have a pleasant life doing that sort of thing, but it doesn't necessarily make the most scintillating reading, and it's a bit of rut from a writing perspective. I believe I've identified another series that will entertain me more for 2019, which I will roll out when I post my resolutions.
As with most of my yearly projects, I learned some interesting things while writing the series.
[A] I actually do a lot of things on the weekends. One of my friends who read some of the posts said my life sounded exhausting. And all that's despite spending 4 hours or so every Sunday at the radio station, which means I'm cramming even more into the rest of the time.
[B] I still eat out way too much. Excluding vacations, the vast majority of the times I ate out were on weekends, and very often I was eating out more than once a weekend. I guess it's good that I can afford to do so, but some part of my brain feels like this is not the best use of my money.
[C] For someone like me who has trouble remembering restaurant names, being able to say, "oh yeah, we went out with so and so on the weekend, let me look up where we ate" is very weirdly helpful. Just last Saturday night I pulled up the name of the Battery Park Pub for a friend who just moved to that area.
[D] I feel like my short term memory got better at holding all of the weekend events in my brain until it was written down. That probably isn't true and certainly can't be measured objectively, but it does feel that way.
[E] I can't help but note that my diary posts were more of a "what I did" then a "what was going on in the world." This is interesting mostly because I certainly have regular conversations about current events with people, especially in the run up to the mid-term election, but it did not occur to me to log even that those conversations occurred, let alone what they were.
With all that said, I think it's time to retire this series. The main reason for this is that the vast majority of my non travel weekends were fundamentally the same. We went out for dinner, I did errands, I consumed media, I did radio. Sometimes I donated platelets or took my aunt out to lunch. Rinse, wash and repeat. You can have a pleasant life doing that sort of thing, but it doesn't necessarily make the most scintillating reading, and it's a bit of rut from a writing perspective. I believe I've identified another series that will entertain me more for 2019, which I will roll out when I post my resolutions.