Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls

by David Sedaris

There was an issue of the local paper in the backseat of the car, and leafing through it on our way there, I came upon a headline that read, “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.” “Hmm,” I said, and I copied it into my little notebook. Tyler did the same but with less conviction. “Why are we doing this again?” “It’s for your diary,” I explained. “You jot things down during the day, then tomorrow morning you flesh them out.” “But why?” he asked. “What’s the point?” That’s a question I’ve asked myself every day since September 5, 1977. I hadn’t known on September 4 that the following afternoon I would start keeping a diary, or that it would consume me for the next thirty-five years and counting. It wasn’t something I’d been putting off, but once I began, I knew that I had to keep doing it. I knew as well that what I was writing was not a journal but an old-fashioned, girlish, Keep-Out-This-Means-You diary. Often the terms are used interchangeably, though I’ve never understood why. Both have the word “day” at their root, but a journal, in my opinion, is a repository of ideas—your brain on the page. A diary, by contrast, is your heart. As for “journaling,” a verb that cropped up at around the same time as “scrapbooking,” that just means you’re spooky and have way too much time on your hands.