. . . and watch and listen.

I’ve always wanted to be a list keeper. Not like grocery lists, to-do lists, checklists — I already do that — more like bird sightings, state parks visited, daily weather reports.

Sometimes I would attempt to keep lists, making a good start but abandoning them after a few entries. Riddled with anxiety (Did I write that down? Did I forget to write that down? Is that the exact date I finished that book? Oh, no! I forgot about that!), they ultimately didn’t seem worth the trouble.

With the aid of technology some lists are automatically kept for us: Goodreads captures books read from Kindle; Netflix and Amazon Prime keep a viewing history; the library tracks reading history if you set it up to do so. This is great if you can’t remember that book you read or movie you watched and want to scroll back through your histories to find it. It’s also dangerous for a wannabe list-keeper like me.

I wanted to summarize something in list form for 2020. Maybe my reading history or just a list of books I liked? But what about podcasts? You can’t leave those out! Okay, so podcasts I liked and books I liked. Who cares? Maybe you should tell people why you like them? Hmm. I don’t want to review things, though. This back-and-forth with myself went on until I came across Modern Adventuress Jen Myers’s Media Log. Myers explains the basic point of keeping a media log:

Typically, we only see the output of artists, the end result they prepare for and present to us. But the end result is a small part of the process, and while you can’t always, or ever, directly trace a certain input to a corresponding output, getting insight on what artists take in themselves is an interesting exercise. It’s even interesting if the people in question aren’t strictly artists, but just other individuals observing and reflecting about the world through the art they interact with.

Jen Myers, Keeping a Media Log

After three days of meticulously combing through all my auto-generated media lists, podcast history, and wracking my brain for missed items, the Media Log section of my website is up, the 2020 list is complete, and 2021 has its first entries.

Even if you don’t get much out of these lists, making them has helped me confirm the insights I had about my media intake (too much, not enough quality, too many binges) and get new ones (sometimes I watch really crappy shows — Married at First Sight anyone?). It also helped me reflect on how much has changed in a year: homeschooling to public school; regular television watching turned manic due to the pandemic.

Reviewing the list brought back reminders of showing the kids a few favorite movies from my teen years: The Legend of Billie Jean and Encino Man. It made me laugh at our family’s pandemic-induced tv-show-picking fatigue that led to a five-night binge of The Twilight Saga that no one really wanted to watch, but that we were bound to do.

What you can’t see in the log, but that I was able to in preparing it, was the large number of TV shows, podcasts, and books that I didn’t finish. For now, I am keeping those out. If I wasn’t interested in it, it probably didn’t impact me much.

For 2021, I hope to see more books (especially by BIPOC authors), more non-fiction (maybe some of the books I started and didn’t finish), more short fiction, and less TV/Movies. Is it too soon to wish for concerts, theater performances, and art exhibitions by the end of the year? Whatever happens, let’s hope I can remember to log them!