Tag Archives: human calendar

Why I am a Human Calendar

Back in college, one of the things I say when I was asked something unique about me was I’m a human calendar. Not that I can give you the day of the date of the certain year, but because I can remember how things happened exactly on a certain given day a year or two ago. And it’s not just a vague recollection, but a specific blow by blow detail — down to what the person wore, to the people around us, to what he/she said and approximately what time it happened. Yes, my long term memory is that good; don’t count on my short term though. :D

My friend Baban had a very scientific explanation for that: what I tend to remember are happy moments — moments where my brain secretes a specific hormone which makes me store the specific moment in my long term memory, even down to the smallest details. Yes, that’s a nice explanation, but I have a better reason why I remember things.

I write.

It occured to me one time during college that I remember the things I take time to write down — the things I blog about or the things I write in my offline journal. No matter how cryptic the entry may seem that other people may never understand it, these specific words trigger something in my memory once they are written down. They tend to stay in my memory longer than the ones I don’t get to write. I bet that if I was given extra time to write everything that happens in the spur of the moment, I’d have a pretty good short term memory too.

Anyway. I was digging through some of the files that I had transferred from an old back-up CD to Aslan‘s hard drive and I found journal entries from one of my first “proper” online journals. It was named Gratitude, from a Chicken Soup for the Soul story I read one time (let me just say: WOW. It’s been a long time since I last read anything from that book). It was my journal from 2000-2001, was powered by Blogger back when it hasn’t been acquired by Google, and its commenting system is still by a third party website called Blogvoices (now closed). I moved it to Greymatter, then finally to b2 (WordPress’ predecessor) before finally closing it down as I moved domains. As far as I know, problogging was not a thing back then, and blogs are usually used to make quick updates to a website without the hassle of re-uploading and re-uploading modified pages. A blog then was also different from a journal — journals are supposed to be deeper, more private (even if people hardly have friends-only journals or password-protected domains), while a blog contains mostly website updates, plugs and incessant calls to sign the website owner’s guestbook. :P Come on, admit it! ;)

So I found old Gratitude archives and I decided to go through them…and man! How immature can one person be?! I found myself cringing at everything I wrote seven years ago, how self-centered I was and how all I focused on was my angst, how much I can’t relate to my high school classmates, how cool I am for having a website, and yes, my current crush. I was also obssessed with having cable internet and a scanner and a digital camera then — laptops, DSL and HDMI were known but waaaay out of my league — and budget. :P Let me quote my entry this day, seven years ago (December 17, 2000):

Good morning! :) Hehe…it’s 6 am here…just came home from dawn mass. You know what suddenly occured to me? People go to mass just for the heck of going. No other serious intentions. I mean, the church was PACKED with people, but not all of them are taking it seriously. My dad even said that it’s probably the first time they even entered the church for a year.
It suddenly irked me that they won’t go to church. I mean, going to mass every Sunday is a Holy Day of Obligation. If you don’t go to mass on purpose, it’s a mortal sin. Some people just weren’t raised to go to church like some other people. Parents support aren’t present. :(
Oh well. Enough about that. Last night, we went caroling! It was SO fun! Today we’re going to do it again. :) We earned P 750 last night. Then we headed over to the CFC’s party to eat and then went to Ryan’s house to watch Kailangan Ko’y Ikaw. Sort of like the Filipino version of Notting Hill, but of course, you won’t really notice. ;)

AGH! And I actually thought I was a good writer then! See how my paragraphs seem so…hanging. So bitin. I could not even explain myself properly — nothing about my deep thoughts nor an explanation of why I believe what I believed. And speaking of beliefs…see how self-righteous that entry was? Ugh.

But as icky as our past journal entries are, it’s fun to look back. It’s fun to laugh at how dorky and moronic we can be before, yes? And because this year’s ending, and there’s nothing more interesting than looking back before a year ends and another one starts, I’ll be re-posting some old journal posts here just so we could laugh at myself, and learn something from the past too. :)

This should be interesting. :)