Mr. Brown (who is rarely much of a technocrat) tells me that I need to start keeping track of all the places to take paper and pencil. "It's like leaving a bookmark when you read. You keep it all in an address book and you can say to yourself, 'I'd really like to write a poem. The best place for a poem would have to be the coffee shop.' So, you simply book it."
"Book it?"
"Sorry, that's one more of the noun-becomes-a-verb phrases. It means you flip through your address book and find the best location."
"Okay, but why don't I just keep it all in my head?"
"Because the pencil world is portable. You can take paper and pencil anywhere. Want to go to Paris? They allow you to take pencil on a boat. Want to visit India? You can bring stationary there, too."
"But I'm most likely to stay here in town."
"Wouldn't you want to keep a list of places you could go if you ever wanted to?"
"Maybe. But I have a hunch I'd probably just go to places I remember and I'd rarely use the address book. I tend to stay in the same sites that I know. I'm a creature of habit."
"Okay, but wait. Check this out. I can leave my address book open for anyone in public to read it. I just turn it in and they copy it and I can go to one location where I read other people's address books."
"Does anyone really do that?"
"Not much. But everyone hopes that other people read their address books."
"So, let me get this straight: You keep a list of places you go or like to go but you rarely look at it and then you leave it at a location where everyone can see it and then you hope to cater to the voyourestic impulses of others, but you have no intention yourself of reading other people's list of sites. Is that generally it?"
"You're a pencil geek. You're supposed to like this stuff. Just sign up and get an address book. It's free."
"Well, I guess if it's free, it couldn't hurt."
I have yet to open the address book, but it's there in case I ever feel the urge to write down my sites and put a golden star sticker on my favorites and then leave it for everyone to see in hopes that they will consider me important enough to spy on me.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Even when social address booking was the new big thing a while back, it never appealed to me, but I couldn't figure why. Hearing you step through the points brought it into focus.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, I realized that, when I'm reading papers, I dog-ear pages all the time, but that it's very, very rare that I go back and re-visit. The important things usually stick in my head. If something is very important and I worry I won't remember it, I write it on my own paper and tape it to my desk so I'll read it every day, until it's part of my brain.