Journals, Dairies, Logs

So this weekend I read this article about a man who wrote down his every thought for three months (and had no time to do anything else…) He described this as a pretty awesome experience, something someone should do once or twice in their life, to get a chance to actually think about the big questions of life in depth, or whatever.
Note, you laptoppers, that he used Pen and Paper, the ultimate tool for recording thought.
I recalled this tonight, while wishing to blog Tal’s awesome entry about dairies and journals. There should be a link here, a fitting segue, but let’s just pretend I wrote it and just go straight to quoting Tal (about the diaries of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski):

The thing is, diaries are used for all kinds of mental bowel movements. Experiments, castigations, blowing off steam, lying, bullshitting, mental doodling, intellectual masturbation, whatnot. Malinowski’s real thoughts may have been entirely the opposite of what he wrote down in the diaries. It’s an important historical document for its general existence as such, including some important details, but it says nothing about Malinowski as a person, except that he was very intelligent, humorous, romantic, had a temper (a well known fact), and was an honest person, trying to be objective about everything, even himself. Whether he succeeded or not should be evaluated according to his accomplished publications, not his nightly doodles for himself.