Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t really use my Apple Notes app for anything other than random thoughts that aren’t particularly important but feel like passing fancies in the moment that I might want to remember. I’ve got multiple notes for everything from my room number when I check into hotels — I’m always worried I’ll forget, but I never have; I also rarely remember to delete said notes until months after whatever trip I was one — to contact details for work people that I’ve never actually used. (I still have people’s numbers on there from when I went to the UK two years ago, in case I couldn’t check into my hotel or get my show pass afterwards.) It’s not the home for anything that would be considered especially necessary.
Amongst those unnecessary things: random sentences that are either observations, or prompts for things that I might one day want to write about here. I started doing it on a trip earlier this year, because something was looping around in my head and I thought, I’ll just put it here and it can get out and I can get on with work and then moved on with my life. (I did, in fact, write it up for here later that night.) The thing is, in many (most) cases, I end up writing things that I don’t remember the context for later, or that aren’t as interesting as I first think when I return to them. For example, currently in notes and pulled at random:
“Everyone wears black”
“The archaeology of my digestive system”
“Sense memory: eating donuts with a fork in the Bee’s Knees”
“Technology changing the shape of the minds eye, landscape of feature films becoming vertical of phones”
The one about the changing shape of the mind’s eye, there’s still something in that, to be unpicked and considered, I feel… But for now, let’s pretend we all know what these meant at the time, and that I wrote about them appropriately. The notes can stand as some nod to unfinished thoughts, like a Beatles Anthology for something far less important.