Timeline? I'll Give You a Timeline

Cutter's Log - Stardate 2012.32.70
Current Song - Canned Heat (Jamiroquai)

I've noticed that a lot of my friends on Facebook have switched to the new "Timeline" format. Facebook thought this was so great of an idea that they thought about making it mandatory for all of its users. Even if we don't like the concept, we wouldn't have a choice.

I'm one of those holdouts. When I saw the Timeline on several of my friends' profiles, it took quite a while to load on the computer screen. I'm a believer in clarity. Many times, technological madness causes many headaches.

Just the thought of a timeline made me think of a timeline of my entire life - all 26 years of it. Now I'm not one of those Marilu Henner-types with total recall, but for some reason I had an increase state of consciousness sometime in early 1990, right around my Mild Autism diagnosis. Since then, many pieces of memory have been retained in my mind.

One of the first assignments I did for Freshman Humanities class (Mr. Walton) was to create a personal timeline of my life, complete with pictures and everything on posterboard. This was a hard one for me, because I knew so much and didn't know what to put down on on the 2x1 posterboard. When others in class were wondering how to fill up all that space, I was trying to figure out what moments of my life would be left out of the fold.

Inspired by this project, I tried to write an autobiographical history of my entire life. It was done on the computer and I got up to 55 or 56 typed pages until reaching the present at the time. Back then (2001) the predecessor to Facebook, MySpace and MSN was something called ICQ. You used to be able to upload typed documents onto ICQ for others to read.

Of course, MANY, MANY things have happened since writing that autobiography - which, unfortunately, I am unable to find in my files.

If I had a month of absolute free time, I think I would be able to write up an autobiography of myself up to this point.

I wonder if my classmates could write up something similar? Or anyone younger than me, for that matter. Because I spend a lot of time at home with my youngest brother Danny, I sometimes tell him a story from when he was younger. He'll often not remember them. Sometimes, trying to remember your kindergarten teacher and your elementary school librarian's name are difficult to come around.

The key to remembering the many details about your early life is to constantly go back and think about them. I remember quite a few things about attending Pre-School at Wallace, as well as both of my kindergarten classes at Jefferson (I was in a half-day class for part of the year and moved to full-day later on). I have numerous memories from attending grade school at Merrill (I could write no less than 15 pages on gym class alone).  

I never wanted to be a school teacher, but I have many friends that are teaching grade school. I often wonder if they think back to their days in the certain grade that they currently teach in. Or if they look at their students and relate them to a classmate of long ago - "he is just like Cody," etc.