Do you keep a journal?

I have written in a journal for about 25 years since our son Theo was born.  I like to use the composition books that you can buy at a drugstore.  My favorites now are the Decomposition books that are made from recycled paper, and have artwork inside the front covers.

Every now and then, I look at the stack of journals where I have documented my most inner thoughts and feelings and wonder what to do with them.  They are not great works of literature, mostly, rants, places to figure out what I think and feel, not something for public knowledge.  I had heard that a university somewhere was studying personal journals, but I couldn’t find the study, even on the Internet.

So, they have become a project, a possible art project.  Here are some of my ideas:

The one that I thought would work the best involved shredding the pages halfway through and displaying them as an open, shredded book. Brillliant!  I have a shredder so I decided to try. As soon as I aligned the journal pages with the shredder, I realized I had one small problem.  The pages were about ½” too wide for the shredder’s mouth. I persisted, stuffing the sides in a little to make them fit, turned the machine on, and watched, much to my horror, as the machine far too quickly ate the pages, pulling them from the book, tearing more pages, almost gobbling up my hand as I tried to retrieve them, until the machine ground to a halt overloaded with paper.  Okay.  Stop. 

Any new ideas?