Tuesday, May 03, 2005

I am in Cincinnati for work and last night I was racking up yet another sleepless night in a hotel room. One tends to bottom out when lying awake in bed and my mind began to wander towards the 90's and what the hell did I do during that decade.

I was born in 1967 so I don't remember the 60's. I spend the 70's basically getting to my teen years; there is a whole lotta shit to remember about that. The 80's saw my teen years and then ended up with my college years, again lots of action. Then we get to the 90's. I worked at some shitty jobs and then got increasingly better jobs (even though work is still primarily shitty), drank decreasingly less, got married and bought a house in there somewhere and then the decade was gone. My son was born in 1998 so I remember what happened after that but the details that I remember from the 90’s are about a tenth of what I remember from the four years of college.

It was then that it struck me that I have been doing things but I haven’t been counting them as things because they haven’t been that terribly exciting and they don’t make that good of a story. But alas this is my life and while I spend so little time doing it I am still somewhat obsessed with documenting it. I thought a good way to do that would be with a graph. Basically a horizontal type graph that showed a variety of things against time. Differently colored sections showing what you were doing in different areas. Where you went to school, worked, lived, who you dated, when your kids were born, pets, vacations even when you met people. Pretty much something to justify what you did with this life that is flying by.

If a website could set up an easy way to do this and then allow people to add diary entries at any point in the timeline you could see what was going on in your life while you wrote each entry. I know this could send the Blog compulsion for many to the geekth degree of documentation where people are not so much writing about living as living to write about it but it could be fun.