i've always been terrified of forgetting, always obsessed with diaries and record keeping and ways to hold on to moments that i felt were disappearing too quickly behind me. these days, my interest in recording my life also intersects with my interest in data and privacy, in the difference between quantitative and qualitative information.

the data on this page is a populated by two main sources.

first, the app lifecycle, which automatically tracks, tags, and compiles my location data into elaborate pie charts to understand how and where i spend my time, down to the minute.

next, a mark rothko wall calendar that i manually fill in with a felt tip pen. it started off as a crude record and has become one of my most cherished possessions.

together, these pieces of data illustrate my life as seen through two kinds of lenses: the objectivity of my hour-by-hour locations and the subjectivity of hand-written memories. and yet even between these, parts of my daily experience are missing.

i'm not sure there will ever be a kind of record-keeping that captures the actual texture of everyday life, the scale and diversity and minutae of experience. that texture is palpable to me looking back at it now, with everything in recent memory. i can see clusters of orange and pink and purple and remember a trip to montauk and a string of dates i went on and the emergence of line dancing as my obsession of the year. between all the data i can remember the moments i've lived, and it's all of that texture rather than the numbers themselves that give me the value.

i also know that my ability to recall that richness out of this data is by no means guaranteed. i know that one day i'll view this data the way you, as a visitor, do: with nuances eroded and just numbers and words left to suggest a life lived. either way at least there's one more set of clues for me to play detective with decades in the future.