An Analysis of My Notes App

The iPhone Notes app is notorious, for many reasons. Grocery lists, to-do lists, half-assed apologies written by influencers and celebrities who have no idea what they did wrong, poems written at 3 AM by teenage girls in their 20s that rival the work of Allen Ginsberg, etc. etc. The list of possibilities that the Notes app holds wouldn’t even be able to fit on a Note in your phone.

As a writer, the Notes app is a vital tool in my craft. I try my best to keep it relevant to my creative writing, but I admit, sometimes my thoughts from day-to-day life need to be memorialized and written down before I forget it. I will sometimes refer back to my sporadic Notes to inject a small piece of real life into my writing, but more often than not, the Notes are there just for laughs. Until now, at least.

I have plenty of story ideas in my Notes that will probably never be published, but I keep them around whenever I run out of steam with my primary stories (the ones that will be published if I have anything to say about it). Some of them have been in my head since high school, and some of them I’ve woken up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night just to scribble down some half-baked ideas I got in a dream.

For example, one of my stories is a collection of perspectives from different people living on a side street in a random town, and general life drama gets in the way of characters meeting goals and making achievements. I’ve been developing this idea since freshman year of high school, and the characters, setting, and situations keep evolving, but the idea stays the same.

In the same vein, I had a very vivid dream in which I was the protagonist of a terribly written Hallmark Christmas movie. Having a dream like that is like finding a 24-karat ring as a cereal box prize, so I wasn’t about to say, “Huh, that was weird, time to move on.” Absolutely not. I did my best and wrote a very minimal description of a new movie I call Oh God, Not Another Christmas Movie!. Main Girl moves back to her small town of Hulmark after her grandfather dies, and while out shopping for her grandma, she meets Some Guy, who is buying materials to build the school’s Christmas play set. Also, he’s a baker. And he runs a farm. What the hell is going on here?

My Notes are filled with poetry. Some of my best work was actually written for classes, but I keep it in my phone because I’m so proud of my words. As I mentioned before, a teenage girl in her 20s can write poetry that can rival Ginsberg, or Plath or Hughes if she’s really going through it. I wrote a very simplistic poem back in January that I don’t even remember submitting for class:

There are also the Notes that end up in my iCloud even though I don’t completely remember writing them. As I was delving through my Notes app in class, I shared one thought that I had happened to write down at some point last fall: “Travis Kurowski looks like yassified Charlie Day.” Now, I’m not wrong, but I probably should not have hit Kurowski with that information at 10 AM on a Monday. That’s a lot of revelations to be throwing at your professor. 

I have plenty of random Notes like this; I used to keep a Note in high school compiled of only lists. I have a list of tattoo ideas that is nearly up to 40 ideas, with some of the ideas being very personal to me (like the time 10:05, after my favorite song) and some of the ideas being somewhat important to me but not necessarily personal (like a quote from the 1995 comedy Tommy Boy starring Chris Farley). I have a lot of tramp stamp ideas, even though I do not plan on getting a tramp stamp. One is a lyric from All Time Low’s “The Girl’s a Straight-Up Hustler,” which reads “Are you having a good time, sweetheart?” The other idea is a portrait of the Twin Towers with a ribbon reading “Never Forget 9/11/2001.” I am nothing if not unpredictable.

One of my favorite Notes is a list that was supposed to be moments that made me smile, but it ended up being mostly license plate names. I drive around and listen to music often, so it isn’t particularly surprising that I write the funny plates down, but I have a lot: VENDTTA on a magenta Lexus, OOMAGIC, SWAGDOG on an armored Hummer, N-ZYME… I don’t have this one written down, but I distinctly remember a lime green Jeep with plates that read WRDSCNCE, and I might be stealing that idea in the future. There are also a couple of bumper stickers that were too good to not remember, like “GET MAD!  I ♥ DRIVING SLOW”.

That same Note with the license plates also holds random phrases that people have said to my face. I’m not the first to admit I’m a little odd, but somehow that just attracts other odd people to my circle. One time, my sister told me, “I just love to slay,” and I had to write it down because, when it really comes down to how a person lives their life, that’s one of the best outlooks you could have. There’s also “Hailee Seinfeld,” because a friend couldn’t remember singer Hailee Steinfeld’s last name, “It hurted two T-rexes,” from a child I babysit for who tried to measure how badly his injury hurt, “My soul is getting a Yelp review,” from a friend who was referring to social media comments… my lists are endless.

My favorite quote, however, is from my own mind. I was trying to figure out how to assess my outfits in the morning. Similar to how Coco Chanel takes one accessory off before leaving the house and how Miss Piggy adds six more, I try to achieve a standard when I leave my dormitory. My brilliant mind created a rubric that I now hold all of my outfits to “Before leaving the house, ask yourself: 

Is it serving C. U. N. T. ?

Creative?

Unique?

Never been done before?

Trendy?”

If your outfit holds to these standards, congratulations, you’re serving.

I hope that my Notes offered an opaque glimpse into my mind. Less to come.