little black book

while cleaning up a week or two ago, i came across a Little Black Book that I made a while ago. Since i'm not a pimp, it doesn't contain phone numbers of hookers. no, it contains something much less valuable: aphorisms and platitudes that I thunk up my very self, or borrowed from others. that, and a run of the mill TODO list.

i recall that the plan was to carry it around with me for a while and write todo items in one end of the book and succinct little this-is-my-philosophy-of-life nutshells in the other end. kind of a book of reminders of what i needed to do in the immediate future, and what i needed to do to keep living my life the way i wanted to live it.

i figured, i think, that maybe i could codify (to what end?) my own personal philosophy, such that it is (aha! that's the end! to find out what it is!). to codify, clarify, and systematize; so that i could avoid that most egregious of sins: hypocrisy.

instead, i got to about the tenth or twelfth little saying and threw it "away" because it pained me so.

i started out with "never lose momentum" and "what are you going to do about it?" and got all the way to "wherever you go there you are."

it pained me so because i wrote "never lose momentum" at a time when I had it, and "what are you going to do about it?" at a time when i had a problem i wanted solved, and yet, i quickly lost my momentum and promptly ignored my problem.

which is to say, i wrote those things after i came back from a spring break of painful longing and frustrated inaction. and rather than live up to what i wanted my personal philosophy to be, i hid my little black book.

now that i've found it again, i can't think of any thing to add to it.

but i don't need to hide it.