For the past five years, this blog has served as my personal journal, among other things. But I've been writing in journal-like settings for longer than that. Probably starting around first or second grade, I would have to write about a certain topic each day in a "journal." The golden age of the journal seemed to be around third grade, which is when I would have to write about things like "How I'd get my cat down from a 10 ft. tree" (February 19, 1998), "My Amazing Machine" (March 30, 1998), and "I Like Being a Boy Because":

I was pretty bent on preserving those editions of "Jordon's Journal," judging by the handwritten alphabetical index of titles I added to the end of each volume. But over the years, my elementary and junior high teachers required less and less journaling. I must have found the practice interesting enough that I decided to keep a real journal for myself.

The book itself is a small notebook that, as I recall, had come pre-packaged with a larger one that I used for school. I had previously used this small notebook as a stick-figure flipbook, but I covered the front cover with paper, leaving a window for the words "The Stick Flipbook," so it would read:

In the first entry, written on the evening of Wednesday, February 24, 1999, I briefly described a few things that had happened that day, including my first encounter with the 50 State Quarters series. I wrote that I had argued with my sister and my friend Sean, and that my friend Reid was "his usual." Such is the exciting life of a nine-year-old. Other entries were equally banal. "Dear Journal," began an entry written three days later,

I wrote about everything interesting that happened, including field trips. ("Dear Journal, I went to the Seaquarium yesterday and found that Flipper is still alive.") Soon, I was writing mainly about interesting things and ignoring the boring days. I would bring my journal on every family trip and chronicle it in detail. The most significant of these was a two-week car trip to Pittsburgh that July, which remains the longest vacation I've ever been on in terms of time as well as distance traveled... probably.

For the duration of the trip, I had Pennsylvania-mania (a term that, while cheesy, cannot be found in the journal). I would write a Pennsylvania-themed trivia question at the bottom of each odd-numbered page and the answer on each even page. I would keep track of our mileage between stops and some of the places at which we ate each day, as well as all the things we did and what time we entered each new state. A typical entry:

The answer is the Pennsylvania Turnpike. At the end of the trip, I had gathered these fun facts:

• We drove 3,353 miles.
• I estimated that we used 134 gallons of gas. I wonder where I came up with the figure of 25 MPG. I probably asked my dad.
• We saw 72 deer. That's kind of a big deal since we don't have them in South Florida.
• We used 10 rolls of film. I estimated this to be 240 pictures.
• We drove through the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Maryland.

In 2000, I wrote about a cruise to Cozumel in March-April and a trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains in October. I also wrote about starting junior high school, mentioning my 22-year-old homeroom teacher, who was "SO HOT!!!" (I'm not going to lie. She was an attractive woman. She probably still is. And dang if I'm not almost as old now as she was then.) I also wrote about the antics of my science teacher, Mr. Tuttle:

There were more excursions to write about in 2001. I covered a trip up the east coast of Florida in April and a wedding in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. I recorded the last entry in the journal on pages 72-74 on Saturday, August 4, 2001. I described my experience at summer camp up to that point and my attempt to start a band with my friends:

Days later, almost on a whim, I would get my first guitar. It was a pivotal moment that helped shape the person I am today. And only 20 months later, I started The World of Stuff and took up journaling again, this time for the world.

And today, I am a Macho Nacho.