Life is Boring & Beautiful
A Year in Journaling
If you ask me 'What's new?', I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it's better today.
I'm content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.
—Wendy Cope, “Being Boring”
Dear Reader,
Happy New Year!
Okay, so it’s April. But it’s a new year for me! As of this coming Monday, it will have been exactly one year since I started keeping a diary. The diary in question has only six lines of space per day, intended to be “a condensed, comparative record for five years, for recording events most worthy of remembrance.”1 My first entry reads:
April 15, 2023. Today I got this journal! Saw it at the book store [sic] and couldn’t resist. Got one for [N.] for her birthday.2
So begins a saga of ink smears and spelling errors.
Truthfully, I’m not one for journaling. I love the idea of it—the handwriting, the emotional catharsis, the leaving-behind of secrets to scandalize future generations. Some of the best writers were brilliant diarists: Woolf, Kafka, Nin. Nevertheless, I find it tedious. When I have time to write, the last thing I want to do is waste it in this world; I’d much rather run off to another. And if I have an emotion to work through, I prefer to turn it into a poem or dump it on a fictional character and make them figure it out. This one-line-a-day business, however, seemed to have potential. At the end of the year, I hoped to be able to look back and see all the exciting things I’d gotten up to.
Well, I’ve done that and have some unfortunate news to report.
I might be a little bit boring.
It’s not that my year was boring. Actually, it was more exciting than usual. I graduated from college, started my first full-time job, attended a birth as a newly-trained doula, experienced the horrors of apartment-hunting, got some of my poetry accepted into lit mags, etc., etc. These pages have everything you could ask for in a diary: friend break-ups, bad dates, personal accounts of historical events—the works. It’s not boring.
But I’m boring. Because those aren’t the entries I like best. The entries I like best are the ones in which nothing happens.
June 4, 2023. Took [L.] to the Met. She liked the American wing. Met up w/ [N.] for lunch at Chelsea Market. Got my favorite spicy noodles!
Keeping a diary is very different from the other writing I do. It doesn’t have to capture a reader’s attention like a novel, nor accurately inform like non-fiction, nor even sound good like poetry. The meat of a diary lies not in plot twists or language, but in its patterns. Reading mine back, I was reminded of An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris in which Georges Perec does nothing but take note of buses and pigeons all day.
October 7, 2023. Put up some book shelves. Dinner at Ninos + drinks at the Ditty w/ [K.] Scary movies w/ roomies + [S.].
What patterns emerge from these pages? I certainly write about the weather a lot. Twice, months apart in time, I noted that walking in the rain made me feel like I was in a Studio Ghibli film. Naps come up more often than I would like—how long, how successful, planned or unplanned. From spring to summer, my concerns transition from completing assignments on time to dealing with the monotony of a desk job. Once, all I had to say about my day was this:
November 4, 2023. Cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed my room, and did my laundry. Felt good. Forgot to wash the towels, but that’s life.
Thrilling.
Mostly, though, the diary is about other people. Who I was with, where we went, and what we did there. Some names change as friends enter and exit the scene; some appear with impressive regularity. Between graduation, moving between boroughs, and rotating roommates, the only constant was that I was always going out for a meal with somebody. The somebody changed, but the company stayed the same.
November 28, 2023. Dinner w/ [L.] and [M.] at their place. Laughed a lot. Got to scratch [P.] under her cute, calico chin.3
This banal list of social interactions becomes more profound when considered in the context of the pandemic. Not long ago, this kind of year seemed impossible—a blessing taken for granted, relegated to a healthier past. A 2020-21 daily journal of mine would have looked very different—less a collection of memories and more All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. As I wrote on July 30, 2023 after a lonely morning, “Life is other people.” Not just people we know, but people we don’t, whose paths we may never cross again.
December 14, 2023. Met two Armenian women on the train home. Lamented the state of the American education system. Nice to chat w/ strangers.
There is an intriguing gap between the fiction I write and my reality. If there is wisdom in the maxim “write what you know,” why don’t my characters ever go out for lunch? That’s clearly what I know best. It’s not like it’s never been done before, either. Some of the fantasy genre’s most pivotal moments happen over food: the White Witch tempting Edmund, Alice turning big and small and big again, Gandalf and the dwarves convincing Bilbo to help them slay a dragon. If nothing else, establishing a character’s normal via food and conversation makes the abrupt change—because what is a story if not change?—worth reading.
January 27, 2024. [N.L.], [L.] and I hung out in the living room and talked all afternoon. Then [N.M.] + [A.] came over for writing group. Pizza for dinner.
The commonplace, the everyday, the mundane—this is most of our lives. We need excitement, to be sure, but excitement—be it positive or negative—is a guarantee. I find myself looking forward to the nothing-days, which are not. In a rare bout of foresight a few weeks before graduation, I managed to catch a happy, boring moment while I was in it:
May 1, 2023. Lunch w/ [K.] today. Then work at Math and watching TV w/ [N.]. Crazy that these times are almost over.
Thanks for reading.
Yours,
Jane
P.S. The soundtrack for today’s post . . .
Dana Tanamachi, One Line a Day: A Five-Year Memory Book (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2023), written in by Jane McBride, in possession of the diarist.
Names abbreviated for privacy.
Yeah, I abbreviated the cat’s name, too. What about it? She could be concerned about internet safety; you don’t know.