The Log I Keep That Isn't for Anyone But Me

Every specimen that comes through the shop gets a card, species, date received, client or accession number, condition notes, date completed. It’s museum habit more than personal preference, Marisol would have my head if I stopped doing it for contract pieces, but somewhere along the way I started keeping the same kind of card, informally, for every book and game I finish too. Title, date started, date finished, three or four lines of what actually struck me, nothing fancier than that.

I didn’t set out to build this. It started because I kept forgetting whether I’d actually finished something or just gotten most of the way through and moved on, which matters a lot to me since I won’t rate anything I haven’t actually completed. The cards solved that practical problem. What I didn’t expect is how much I’d end up using them for something else entirely, going back through a year’s worth of cards and noticing patterns I’d never have caught otherwise, how often I reach for something dense and difficult in January specifically, how a bad month at the shop tends to show up as three or four fast, easy reads in a row instead of whatever I was supposedly working through at a slower pace.

The cards are for nobody but me, which is a strange thing to admit on a blog where I’m presumably writing for an audience. I don’t transcribe them here, most of what’s on a given card is too specific or too boring to be worth anyone else’s time, a half-formed thought about pacing, a reminder that I need to reread something in a year once I’ve cooled off on my first reaction. But the habit itself, cataloging the thing after it’s finished the same exact way I catalog a specimen after it’s finished, tells me something honest about how I actually think, that I don’t fully trust an experience to mean something until I’ve written it down in the same format I use for work.

I know I’ve got a habit of sticking with one book until it’s worn out and I’m tired of it rather than jumping around, and the cards make that pattern obvious in a way I never noticed before I started keeping them. I don’t know if any of it is a healthy instinct or just a professional tic that leaked into the rest of my life. Probably both. Either way, I’ve got a shoebox of index cards going back a few years now, and on a slow week I’ll pull a handful out at random just to see what I was reading and thinking a year or two back, which is its own small kind of company.