Of course I will be doing it, I just haven't done it yet....

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/10/21 13:16 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/10/21/5578381.aspx

Kind of a meta-blog post....

I have a friend who told me how she and her boyfriend, despite often being separated by travel, have at the very least talked by phone every day for over a year -- and they alternate who calls each time.

I was stunned -- I mean, how could anyone accomplish that?

Forget about the "we're in love" crap, the ins and outs of life alone will often get in the way. How could a daily call be so consistently never forgotten?

Then she told me their secret.

They have no set time for their daily call.

If it is getting late and designated callee of the day has not heard from the caller, the callee might call and wonder whether someone forgot to call....

And then the caller can deny this and say that of course they didn't -- they had to finish doing the thing they were doing first. They were of course going to call, just not yet....

How does this relate to the blog?

Well....

I do not have a PDA.

And my handwriting is awful enough that I don't carry around a paper and pen.

I do have a laptop (actually, several of them!) but opening them up in random places to take down notes is generally not practical.

The upshot of all this is that there are lots of times when I don't have a chance to write stuff down.

This should not matter because I tend to remember everything, right?

Well, no.

For whatever reason, when I think of ideas that might be become interesting blog posts, I remember probably less than a quarter of them by the time I in a position to record it so I won't forget it.

Conversations with people, I usually remember. But even conversations about blog posts I tend to forget what the idea was even if I remember that an idea was mentioned.

Now sometimes I remember some of them later, or the idea comes up again and I remember that it was already an idea.

And obviously there always seems to be something to write about, so the blog itself is not starving -- the beast is fed pretty regularly.

But from time to time someone will ask me if I wrote about that thing that came up in a conversation, and sometimes it is one of these "lost ideas."

And I say not yet, but it'll get there eventually....

So are my friend and her boyfriend lying when they say they didn't forget?

Am I?

I haven't decided yet for sure, but I am inclined to say no.

That tickler keeps you from forgetting, so the claim that the call would happen is true, in large part because of the unspoken "because I have you to keep me from forgetting" that the other person may not even know about is a real thing.

It is much more genuine than a situation that is a lie. Like the reflex response to the late phone call question "Did I wake you?" (you know, where you almost always say no, you didn't even when you obviously did).

We never thank people for reminding us, mainly because the delicate dance of the illusion of remembering demands of us that we do not. But we owe them our thanks....

I don't mean to imply that I am in love with all my readers, or that they are in love with me. I just noticed the situational similarities!

If you wonder whether you are yourself in that same category for me, the easiest way is to put in the Suggestion Box or in email, like via that Contact link. Because once it gets there, it won't ever be forgotten, until it is done. :-)

This post brought to you by ⩬ (U+2a6c, a.k.a. SIMILAR MINUS SIMILAR)

# Gene on 21 Oct 2007 4:47 PM:

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