December 27, 2010

A Lost Habit

Santa Barbara High School
During my senior year at Santa Barbara High School, I had an AP English class with Mr. Dovgin.  At the time he was probably in his mid-50's, but he was one of those teachers who was just absolutely cool.  Not cool in the, "I don't give a shit what you do in my classroom." kind of way, but cool in that even as a 17 year old kid, I could tell that this guy had his shit dialed in and at some point back in time (hell, maybe even on the weekends) he was the kind of guy that probably threw some really interesting parties.

Every time you walked into his class, he had music playing.  We're talking vinyl. From a 45. Random shit, too.  One day it was Miles Davis, the next, Hendrix.  In my mind, I could see Mr. Dovgin sliding around the corner of the building during his lunch hour and burning one down.  The thing that made me like him most, was that he often went outside of the box with assignments and teachings, and he could be a bit of a hard-ass grading papers which was often frustrating to a student like me who enjoyed bullshitting his way through a paper every now and again.

One of Dovgin's assignments was a journal, turned in weekly and graded.  I absolutely hated this journal. You had to write it in one of those shitty manila covered composition books and of course every entry had to be at least so many pagers long.  I wasn't a fan of "letting my thoughts flow" onto paper at the time, so this term long assignment just plain sucked to me.

As I move through life, one of the things that I see more often than not is that it's often the decisions of others that have the most influences on our own, and this played true with Dovgin's journal assignments.  As much as I hated them through his entire AP English class, when I stopped doing it a funny thing happened.  I missed it. I realized that I was always fascinated with the passing of time and periods of time in history, and my own life was no exception.  I found that I liked picking up that journal and flipping through it to see what state of mind I was in on any given day, and when the entries stopped so did my ability to connect with my past. I missed that habit.

So on a January morning in 1994 in the bookstore at UCSB, I picked up a small hard cover blank journal and decided to start up the tradition once again.  My first entry was on my 19th birthday.  I did my best to keep it current; sometimes I'd knock out 2 entries in a week, other times I'd lapse for 2-3 months at a time, but I'd always come back to the journal.  I would travel with it and make entries from wherever I was on vacation. I'd break it out and read through past entries when thoughts came to mind or when I was trying to remember when or where I met someone.  It was a really helpful tool, mostly psychologically. The journal became a therapist of sorts.

I would bitch about the crappy part time job that I was working at, or excitedly count down the days to my Catalina Island vacations.  Whatever was at the surface at the given moment went down on the page, and that was what made it so relevant.  I could flip back 3 years in time, read an entry, and remember the feeling of that day based solely on the way that it was written.  That always captivated me, for some reason.

Eventually the book fizzled out for good, gone the way of many other good intentions in my life that I meant to keep up but never did.  Let's face it, the more years that you pack on, the more complex life gets by nature, and that's a really shitty reality at times.  I often long for, and am jealous of, the simpler lives led by many of my friends or old acquaintances, but I wouldn't trade a moment of my past or present life with them. Where I've been and where I am make me who I am, and where I'll be. But the little joys in life (like the book) often fall prey to the complexities.

Now, I spend a dedicated portion of my day with a computer on my lap or in front of my face.  Why, I asked, don't I take the concept of the book and apply it to my modern world to see if it can survive and thrive once again.  So here I am, propped up on my bunk at work, rediscovering a lost habit. And it feels good! 

What will it be? Different from what it once was, that I'm sure of. But isn't that how things work? Time passes and things evolve, and this will too.  So this will be a new place for the proud parent stories, the animated rants, the details of travel, and the minutiae of life.  Here we go again...