Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,68

handwriting looks like?

Volume 132, 12/5: Sister Gretchen has her furnace serviced by a man named Mike Hunt.

Over a given three-month period, there may be fifty bits worth noting, and six that, with a little work, I might consider reading out loud. Leafing through the index, which now numbers 280 pages, I note how my entries have changed over the years, becoming less reflective and more sketchlike. It’s five a.m. in the lobby of the La Valencia Hotel, and two employees are discussing parental advice. “I tell my sons they should always hold the door open for a woman,” says the desk clerk. He is a Hispanic man, portly, with a lot of silver in his mouth. A second man stands not far away, putting newspapers into bags, and he nods in agreement. “I tell them it doesn’t matter who the lady is. It could be a fat chick, but on the other side of the room, a pretty one might look over and notice, so even then it’s not wasted.”

Here is a passenger on the Eurostar from Paris to London, an American woman in a sand-colored vest hitting her teenage granddaughter with a guidebook until the girl cries. “You are a very lazy, very selfish person,” she scolds. “Nothing like your sister.”

If I sit down six months or a year or five years from now and decide to put this into an essay, I’ll no doubt berate myself for not adding more details. What sort of shoes was the granddaughter wearing? What was the name of the book the old woman was hitting her with? But if you added every detail of everything that struck you as curious or spectacular, you’d have no time for anything else. As it is, I seem to be pushing it. Hugh and I will go on a trip, and while he’s out, walking the streets of Manila or Reykjavík or wherever we happen to be, I’m back at the hotel, writing about an argument we’d overheard in the breakfast room. It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

Were I to leave the hotel without writing in my diary, though, I’d feel too antsy and incomplete to enjoy myself. Even if what I’m recording is of no consequence, I’ve got to put it down on paper.

“I think that what you have is a disorder,” Hugh likes to say. But who proves invaluable when he wants the name of that restaurant in Barcelona that served the Camembert ice cream? The brand of soap his mother likes? The punch line of that joke he never thought was funny? “Oh, you remember. Something about a woman donating plasma,” he says.

Of course, the diary helps me as well. “That certainly wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,” I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes a while to look these things up.

The diary also comes in handy with my family, though there it plays the same role as a long-lost photograph. “Remember that time in Greece when I fell asleep on the bus and you coated my eyelids with toothpaste?” I’ll say to my brother, Paul.

To heavy pot smokers, reminders like these are a revelation. “Wait a minute, we went to Greece?”

As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof. In this regard too, my diaries have proven me wrong. All I do is think up impossible situations: here I am milking a panda, then performing surgery, then clearing the state of Arizona with a tidal wave. In late November 2011, my most lurid fantasies involved catching the person who’d stolen my computer, the one I hadn’t backed up in almost a year. I’d printed out my diary through September 21, but the eight weeks that