in praise of casual archiving + my archives
I was hanging out with my friend yesterday, the one I've known since grade 5. We were just chatting and reminiscing, and at one point we were searching for images of an event, and she was shocked to see that I had 20,000 photos in my phone library. She lamented about how she doesn't take pictures of anything, leaving vast time periods relatively undocumented.
I've always latched onto many mediums of documentation, whichever were available to me at different points in life. I have piles of journals (most unfinished) dating back as young as 4 years old, and of course, 20,000 images spanning 8 years at the press of a button.
Those are relatively standard examples of the ways that we archive our lives. Retellings of our days pen to paper, polaroids that are in little albums, or pinned to walls. I think the practice of putting time into a tangible medium stretches much farther than that.
THE BOOK ANNOTATION
While I'm very cautious of lending books out to friends (I'm horrible at returning them on time, and have definitely lost a few books to lending them out), I still love to share media and so I do nonetheless.
I sent a friend from uni back overseas with a very special book to me: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. It's the book that got me back into reading literature after a vast stretch of non-consistent reading through middle school all the way to grade 11. When I was reading it, it was for a summer school English assignment, so I was taking annotations within the book margins. I'm not usually a hardcore annotator, but when I reread the book long after I had made those notes, I was instantly sent back to my backyard, summer 2023 with a San Pellegrino at my side. I could practically feel the blood orange fizzle on my tongue.
While books already have their own quality of time and numerous ways to catalogue them (Author name, title, genre, publishing date, etc), when I added my own mark on it, it gained a new cataloguing factor. Date read. Period, era of my life. It began a personal archive of my literary media intake.
THE TO DO LIST
I think this is an especially fun way to archive long, even small stretches of time. Especially in a productivity focused environment like architecture school, or really in a productivity focused world, tracking and annotating the time based on tasks completed is simply satisfying. It feels endless when you're writing down every little thing that needs to get done, but sitting back after the end of a semester and seeing just how much you got done in a few short months is more of a reward than passing the semester (almost)!
In my journal at the moment, I'm keeping slight to do lists, but there's truly not much to do in the summer! Having those previous archives showing that I'm capable of doing mass amounts of meaningful work has definitely been a really good pushing factor for me this summer, especially artistically. If I can do it for school, I can do it for myself!
Here's a few other examples of metrics and archiving bits and bobs that I don't have much to elaborate on:
- The timestamp of how long you had been on a phone call after you hang up
- Annotations on sheet music pages, both from you and from your teacher
- Scuffs and stains of different colours on your shoes (bonus if they're white)
- Loading the laundry in and travelling back in time as you reach the bottom of the bin of clothes
- Receipts stuffed into your wallet, never to be reviewed again until you pull them all out at once
And here's some intentional archiving from my journal. These are excerpts I find myself reading back on a lot.
Feb. 5 2025
For me, life should always be exciting. The goal is to find even my morning cup of coffee riveting. Fascination for life or desperation for more?
Is desperation a bad thing? Should we strive to let things come as they're meant to, or should we grab & grab & grab until our nails are brittle & fingers numb?
Feb. 8 2025
What is an action? How indirect, intangible can one be? Can the way your eyes connect with someone across a room be considered an action? Who looked first? Would it be defined by the look, or by the pang in the heart that one or the other or both feel in the wake?
May 29 2025
I denounce difficulty. The way it dictates not only whether one can gather the bravery to do the necessary, but whether the world will believe in them when they take the plunge. The way it trumps the gut feeling, the desire to push onward! It asks not whether or not you need to do it, but whether or not you can bother to do it.
I denounce perfection. The way it takes the pen off the paper, the mouse away from "send", the opportunity out of reach. The false notion that there will always be better, more polished, when the best there is is what you've already conjured in your mind.
Reminded of the quote, "The best building is the one that already exists."