My Love Affair

Fact: I have an ongoing love affair.....with notebooks. (Also fact: this title is extremely misleading.)

I've always loved notebooks. I always secretly loved the beginning of a new school year, because it was an excuse to buy and use a variety of new, fresh notebooks. I've always loved writing longhand more than typing on a computer, because I love filling up dozens and hundreds of blank pages with my handwriting. I love making notes, crossing stuff out, circling things and pointing arrows to other things. I love buying day planners, and notepads for to-do lists, and writing letters as opposed to sending an e-mail. I love the more traditional side of writing because it just feels so much more personal. A blank sheet of paper feels like a fresh start.

As much as I love notebooks, though, they're just so....inconvenient. Painfully so, actually. For several reasons:

1. HAND CRAMPS

I don't know if it's because I'm rusty (not being in school means that I don't have to take notes and write things down every day), but I feel like almost every time I go to write something down, my hand cramps up. Granted, I do try to write inhumanly fast....but still.

Speaking of...

2. HOLY CRAP WRITE FASTER

I take 5ever to write things out by hand--if I have any hope of reading it later, actually. I have had more than enough experience with university lectures to know that writing quickly means one of two things: either my writing will be chicken scratch and near impossible to read, or it will be filled with abbreviations and shortcuts that I made up on the spot and will have no hope of understanding later.

Typing is just so much faster.

3. OKAY WHERE DID THAT ONE THING GO AGAIN?

I won't lie to you: I am extremely unorganized. If I write something down and have any hope of finding it (or even remembering that it exists) later, I have to stick a post-it and put a reminder on my phone.

Let me repeat that: I have to make sure that all of my notes are also on an electronic device if I have any hope at all of ever seeing it again. Kind of defeats the purpose of writing it down, doesn't it?


But none of these stop me, of course. I'm incredibly stubborn. When I stumble upon a brand new, colourful journal in Wal-Mart, with smooth pages and a pretty pink ribbon bookmark, I don't think about how my hand will cramp or the months that will pass before I fill the pages or whether I'll ever read the stuff I write on them again. I don't think about how I'll have to type 90% of my words on the computer, anyway, or how the vast majority of the To-Do lists I scrawl inside will go uncompleted.

I just buy the damn thing. I buy it and use it, as inconvenient as it may be, because the simplest act of moving my pen across a blank sheet of paper brings me an infinite amount of joy.

Until later,

- Justyne