A little while ago I got to thinking about three different incidents in my life and how they might form the basis for a blog post.

The more I thought about it though, the more I felt I should disguise the identities of the people involved, so I decided to write it up as a piece of fiction instead. A short story or a series of three vignettes, perhaps.

I plotted it out in my mind and decided it would work but realized I didn’t have time to write it just then, so lest I forget, I’d jot down a few notes to remind me later.

When I checked back a few weeks later, here are the notes that I found, in toto:

Meet three people who don’t know anything about computers.

That’s it.

And no, even after only a few weeks, I no longer recalled what I was thinking, even though it started out as three incidents in my life.

Will I ever remember? Perhaps, but it wasn’t just three people and three incidents, it was a particular way of relating them together, and in the words of Jim Webb “I’ll never have that recipe again”.

The point is I’m a terrible note taker. Always have been. I always think I’ll remember something from a very cryptic note, but I seldom do.

That’s how I took notes in high school and that’s how I did it in college.

In high school it didn’t matter, because usually anything the teacher talked about in class was in the textbook, and if it wasn’t, the teacher would make a point of saying so. And slow down to make sure we’d write it down. And emphasize that it was going to be on the test. And in any case high school classes generally weren’t all that difficult anyway.

In college things were different; the lectures usually supplemented the textbooks, or often contradicted them, and twice as much material was covered in half as much time.

Poor note taking is not the main reason why I didn’t do well at Penn State, but it may have been a minor contributing factor.