A couple months ago I gave in and bought a mini-voice recorder. As a journalism student I've spent almost my entire university life writing stories from notes that I'd written during the course of many interviews. In class I chose to listen to the professors who said that much like recording lectures, recording interviews was a waste of time, forcing one to play and replay the tape for the sake of a quote or two (I saw how true this was when transcribing Naomi Klein's speech at last month's "Navigating a New World" conference at the University of Toronto. Did it really matter if the subject said "that is what I really want" as opposed to "I want that really badly?" If the subject cannot repeat verbatim what he or she just said, why is it your job to do it for them?

I've discovered since buying the voice recorder that the reason is not that I have to get it right for them, it is so that I don't totally screw it up. I was very surprised when I first discovered that when transcribing a simple line how my brain puts the words coming from the voice recorder into a different narrative, with new words and ideas spliced into the sentences which I then type into the draft. When I check for accuracy, guess what? I find words missing, words added and sometimes even words replaced ("happy" turned into "shocked", "took the streetcar" turned into "caught the streetcar.") On the surface they all look like simple , inconsequential discrepancies, but it is amazing just how much my mind leaves behind as I go through this process that I was sure I'd had down pat for the past five, six years. My biggest worry, and this comes in hindsight, is what if one of those mistakes was not so simple, so inconsequential? What if I'd mistaken the words of the mayor's spokesperson, or of Abby Rockefeller or a Member of Parliament? Yikes.

I write this now because I finally watched Christopher Nolan's Memento yesterday. The main character, Leonard, lost his short-term memory and cannot generate new memories, and he says something to the effect of "if you can't trust your own mind, how can you trust anybody else?" You could argue that people I want to trust have a much greater impact on my life than some fly-by-night interview subject so I concentrate more on getting things right with them, but then I would argue that those fly-by-night interviews will go much farther in my aspirng career as a journalist, hence I would work that much more harder to get those things right.

What I've found of course is that what I want doesn't matter, that what I think is right is what is actually inconsequential. Because if I can't get something right in the half-second it takes for me to hear something to entering it into a computer, then the objective fact is I didn't get it right. The subjectivity is gone. Forget what I think, or want to think. I got it wrong.

Thank goodness for the voice recorder, because it records facts. It is my polaroid camera, snapping objective pictures, while my notes are what I write around the picture that it captures. And now I have to rethink everything I know or think I know, and figure out if those things are right, or that I only want them to be right.