I am a horrible diarist, and only a middling weblogger. I received my first diary at age eight from my beloved aunt, and I proceeded to very carefully write about each of my days (including the 1988 presidential election) for about two weeks.
Then five years later I found the diary and wrote in it again. For about two weeks a year until I was sixteen, I wrote in my first diary. I filled maybe thirty pages in it. It’s not in the least interesting – I tore all the good stuff out when I was paranoid that my mother was reading it. She wasn’t.
Just about each year of my life I’ve recorded brief snippets, but never a consistent flow, nothing that would allow my superior pattern recognition skills to see themes in my life like “Caffeine makes me jittery and stay up all night” or “I went to the Farmer’s Market on Fridays for an entire year and never realized it”. I want revelations, damn it! I want to look in my old archives and think “Hm, three years ago I was on my way to Basque country disguised as a bank teller. I only made it to Portugal. What went wrong?”
However, even the little journalling I do has taught me a lesson. If every entry I have archived is utterly boring and devoid of insight, then the solution is simply to have a more interesting life.