I am kind of geeky. Despite this, I still have a paper journal. I can see a lot of advantages to electronic journals — easily searchable, cheap, easy to back up, no writer’s cramp, etc., but I just can’t get past the wonderful thing that is a paper journal. Paper journals are more portable, work without electricity, no worries about file formats, and there’s just something wonderful about sitting and actually physically writing your life out on paper, in a real book that often reflects your personality as much as the writing does. I have dozens of journals that I’ve filled over the years, and I love seeing them on the shelf: easily accessible, physical evidence of years of my life. The only thing I have to worry about is fire or flood, which would destroy my electronics and backups as well as my physical journals. I sometimes have mementos stuffed between the pages, even. And I hope that someday some of my descendants will open the musty pages of those journals, revel in the scent and feel of them as I have other old books, and remember me.
I can understand the preference for print over electronic storage of journals and writing; I hate to think of how upset I’d be if I lost my laptop or if it stopped working … and I have already been through that once. Even now I still have this slim hope that I will find the disk on which I backed up my previous laptop. I also had pictures on there, and downloaded music as well.
Oh and once I wrote a journal on a trip I was taking and tried to send it back home in a package to myself, but I overstuffed the package and it busted open and got lost in the mail. It was a journal with Superman on the cover that I lost almost eight years ago now. Time flies.