silva rerum

I would have written a shorter letter

Some don’t know this about me, but I have a deep and longstanding love for notebooks of all sorts: lined, ruled, A4, pocket-sized, blank, composition, etc.. There’s something so promising about a blank notebook – it’s a tabula rasa, waiting to be filled with doodles, sketches, ideas, musical compositions, fables, stories, tragedies, comedies, satires, anything. It’s so innocuous too; we’ve all used notebooks as children in elementary school – completing arithmetic practice or writing journal entries with accompanying drawings.

It shouldn’t be surprising that my post-BIOL 334 splurge was on a pocket Moleskine notebook (blank pages, I don’t like ruled – the lines feel limiting). I’m still searching for an appropriate accompanying pen but the Zebra G-301 pictured will do nicely until I find a better pen.

As with most notebook fanciers, I suffer “blank notebook syndrome,” a paralyzing disorder in which I am loathe to scribble upon the pristine pages of a new notebook lest I ruin its beauty. If I intend to use a notebook, I need it to be used thoroughly, fully, I need to really commit to it. I’ve torn pages out of notebooks in which I used one page in order to regain the “new notebook” feel. It’s a pathology.

At any rate, Moleskine is renowned for their (expensive) notebooks; GTD devotees stock up on Moleskines when (and if) they go on sale while authors, musicians and artists take comfort in the fact that they are joining Hemingway and Matisse in using the ubiquitous, black notebooks.

Of course, I’ll be modifying my Moleskine; I’ll be picking up some durable plastic tabs to section off the book. I’m wondering what I’ll use it for though, I want to ask for suggestions.

Here is what I can imagine myself using it for:

• reminders for due dates, action items, etc.
• important appointments
• interesting quotations (from poetry, from people, from literature, etc.)
• blog post ideas
• *chicken-scratch” sketches
• brainstorming
• contact information

I’m keeping a few 3”x5” index cards in the back pocket because it seems like a sensible thing to do.

Of course, I’m not a Moleskine snob, I’ve got a variety of notebooks in my cupboard; many unused and collecting dust because I haven’t purposed them yet. I don’t want to ruin them. I might just end up collecting them.

Even with innovations like the Livescribe Pulse Smartpen (which I wouldn’t mind trying out, if I had the disposable income), I’ll never stop loving the tactile feel of paper notebooks, nor will I ever lose my admiration for their simple elegance.