A while back, Starlet was asked to play a fundraising event for a local theater troupe. (I'd say with self-conscious self-deprecation that we were hired to play the exit music for the event, but for two things: we played for free and everyone was gone by the time we took the stage. But I digress.) The fact is, I attend shamefully few plays or performance art events, so I tend to be pretty enraptured by live theater when I experience it. In this case, one of the performance pieces involved a pretty original and extremely honest approach to journal writing. Years earlier, the actor had given a series of friends an assignment: on a particular day but at a time they could each choose at "random", they were to send him a page. Each time he received a page, he had to stop whatever he was doing and start writing about it at length. On an index card from a pack he carried with him all day, he described his location, the activity he was engaged in, the people he was with, his emotional state, and whatever thoughts were racing through his head when the page interrupted him. He didn't write unless he was paged, and he promised to himself to write exhaustively and openly when each card was pulled. On the night when he ultimately descibed this process to the audience, members pulled cards from a hat to springboard him into a controlled improvisation that, while fascinating, won't be documented here.
I loved the idea of having punctual, accidental inspiration to write journal entries. One reason I've shied away from keeping a public or private journal is that I believe it's inherently difficult to keep the voice honest, in both the universal and personal sense. Not only are we drowning in sensations which our brains are wired to filter, generalize, and simplify, but we are also our own harshest editors, constantly rewriting the history of our pre-filtered experiences into the propaganda of our self-image (be it self-aggrandizing, self-defeating, or whatever). Worse still, we play myriad roles in our lives: the voice of which role is speaking through this journal? Which aspects of my life get included, and which get excluded? How are weights attributed to events? It's pretty easy to look at diaries and autobiographies as largely fictional when you consider the manipulation that goes into even the most earnest of them.
A random sampling process removes a few of those variables in that you can't pull memories from a selective subset of your experiences, nor write about them after they've been processed and stored. It seemed like a more accurate representation of a day's experiences could be achieved through this sort of statistical stampling. But as I schemed to perform this excercise myself one day (using a script, of course, for truer randomness), it became obvious that the observer effect applies: knowing that one is living a self-recorded day is likely to affect the living of it. Even if the day itself could be chosen at random, from a trigger sampling from months into the future, there would still be too much pressure to make the selected day extraordinary. The best possible solution would be to spread the pings out across a long expanse of time rather than a day. A month? A year? Not sure what length of time I'd be willing to tote index cards (or even a cell phone) around religiously. Not to mention that I don't keep a diary-like journal or blog. But if I keep this up for, say, a year, I think I'll endeavor to perform this experiment...somehow, somewhere.
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