20 MARCH 2026 - MONDAY

obsidian, note-taking, journaling, and what are all of these notes for anyways?

I hear conversations about Obsidian and how life-changing it has been for so many people around me. My coworkers, my close friends, even distant relatives mentioning it dinner. I have always been someone who really just likes taking notes, so that's pretty much all I use Obsidian for. Then I hear about how others use it and I'm like damn! I'm really not getting the most out of this app am I? Oh, but of course, I know apps are only as useful as we allow them to be for ourselves. I can't force myself to use someone else's workflow if we have different ways of thinking, hobbies, ideas for organization, etc. Still, it's just a bit of a bummer (to me) to know what Obsidian is capable of but still use the app at it's pretty base level.

My habit for note-taking extends to physical journals. I keep several books:

• I have a planner that I treat as my "everything" planner - all of the things that have a date and time, I write it in here first. It's my immediate reference for when the question, "hey when was that thing?" pops into my head. It's also incredibly messy, so it isn't really for long-term archival purposes.
• I use a 2026 dated weekly standard size planner from Sterling Ink for memory-keeping, as the weekly pages have a set amount of space for each day all on one full spread. One side of the spread has the days, the other a free open space for notes throughout the week, small lists, or quick thoughts to be jotted down. This book is more for when the questions, "how did I feel that day?" or "what did I do last week?" come up in my mind. It contains more specific notes, so if I need to recall important things like what my prescription meds are and when I last picked them up or what days my trips were so I can tell my mother, I can just check this book.
• Lastly I have a big notebook for journal entries and a "junk journal" for whenever I wanna just do some random creative shit on paper (or just cuss at the world for a second, it never has to make any sense anyways.) Both of these books are used for just venting, and I make sure to keep at least one of them in my bag when I go out.

At some point, I had the fleeting thought that I could use Obsidian to convert my older journals into digital notes. Some of them contain notes I took during convention panels, lectures from years ago, articles that friends have sent and so on. The part I wouldn't be all too excited to do would be combing for all of that along with everyday journal entries from when I was a different person. It could be important for self-reflection, but I also kind of don't want to be reminded of how much I fucked up in college and how much I wrote about it.

I write so many notes for myself, I check my notes all the time, though sometimes I wonder if it's just comforting to have it as a habit. I don't like to read back thru all of the things I've written, but it does feel good in the moment to let it all out somewhere, be it on tangible paper or a digital canvas. It's probably fucking main character syndrome to think that some random person in the future will find my notes and think some of them are useful, but I'll go ahead and admit that it crosses my mind now and again. I write what food I ate, where, who was around me, what I felt, do I wanna go again, and if I believe in good or don't. Maybe all that information could be arbitrary, but when historians of the future come around it could be potentially useful. That the perspective of someone was just there and existing is worth preserving. That I was here, and there's proof of it on this planet.

Whatever future comes, I hope that people still write down stuff about werewolves and vampires or the many different ways to prepare matcha and how it doesn't make you a terrible person for simply liking it. I know I will, to the detriment of everyone else. Conformity is massively lame and I don't want to feel like I have to write about the right stuff or say the right things in my writing in order for it to be relevant anyways. Besides, when people read the history books everyone remembers the weird, abstract shit more anyways.

All the notes I take are inherently for me and no one else. The forms of which they take all differ, and I'll probably ruminate a little bit more to figure out how Obsidian could make reviewing some of my notes more efficient. Ultimately, I just want to avoid overanalyzing my notes. Obsidian as it currently stands feels like I can't use it for anything more whimsical, silly, and specifically non-academic. The overall vibe Obsidian gives is elevated and educational. The vibe all my writing has is SCTRFEAMING SCREAMIHNG SCREAMING INTO THE VOID. I digress lmao.

I'll probably continue on using it to house my blog posts, notes, and resources I find online. For now, I'll continue to feel a little bit out of depth figuring out what bases are and which community plugins to use...