Write your autobiography.
Writing is a good thing to do. I don't mean sending text messages or quick e-mails in code. I mean considered writing, where you have a chance to go back and fix what you need to fix, add, change around, clarify. Writing, said the man, clarifies your thinking. Not that I'm saying your thinking needs to be clarified; it's just that all of us have ideas that could be useful to our friends and our colleagues, and setting them out clearly could just be a service to everyone. If you were to keep a blog, such as this one, you're not going to force anyone to read the thing, and anyone who took something away from it would come back eventually to check it out.
Writing fiction is an interesting thing: why write fiction? I began to write fiction just for my own amusement, and very soon it became a hobby that I took a lot of delight in. But an enormous first step was writing my own autobiography.
I started one day some 15 years ago, typing it into one of the computers where I work. Back then, they only had what we now call mainframes: computers with wires going to many offices, and each person could maintain his or her own files in the computer, until every once in a while someone came round telling you to get rid of any files you did not want!
For various reasons, having typed in close to 15 years' worth of reminiscences into the project (just an enormous text file, really), I went away one summer, and came back to find that they had moved the files into a newer mainframe, and my de-crypting routine was now useless. I could not read my own autobiography, because I had encrypted it with a computer-specific procedure.
Anyone who starts such a project today, of course, will never have the same problem. Encryption is no longer really necessary, because very few people have others fooling with their files, in the first place, and security is fairly uniformly well understood.
A very good reason for writing your autobiography is that you're probably not going to get stuck for material.
You start out with a brief biography of each of your parents. Make these brief, because you can always expand them later.
Describe your older siblings, if any. Describe the time and place of your birth. Alter the facts, if you're nervous about privacy.
Fill in year after year, as much as you remember. To help you remember: always record where you spent the important feasts in your family: Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc, and any antics you, your siblings or your friends got into. Record acquisitions of things important to your family, e.g. bicycles, yachts, automobiles, skates, etc; even private jets are good. Record the arrival of younger siblings, and marriages and any other catastrophes visited on your older siblings.
Make sure you pay homage to any good teachers you have had. Teachers get very little credit in this society, and make sure you do your part to correct this defect. Big political events are natural milestones in an autobiography, especially your reaction to them at the time, and your thoughts looking back. Students you admired in school, big victories in high school that you remember; your driver's license. High school sweethearts, the ones that got away, and the ones you could not escape.
My own autobiography was centered around Christmases. Music was big in our family, and I wrote as much as I remembered of each Christmas. Our mother was often a resource-person for the musical and dramatic events wherever we happened to be, so that we were swept along with the general enthusiasm of our neighbors.
You can stop it anywhere. Keep it ready, if you ever want to do something with it, or just leave it to your descendants, or just delete it when you think might forget how to do it pretty soon.
Good writing!
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