#5: Keeping Notebooks
I realized I might be someone who doesn’t take the New Year very seriously when I was sitting in bed at 9 PM, scrolling through Instagram and saw how many people were taking the time to reflect on 2020 or express relief that 2020 was over. Maybe it’s because I feel like I’m always trying to reinvent myself or restart so much throughout the year that doing it for the New Year just makes it seem like it’s just another Friday.
These reinventions always include finding apps to help me organize my life, reorganizing my journal for lists, tracking, and so on; reorganizing my calendar, and straightening out my hobbies. It falls in line with the typical New Year’s resolutions: I will journal more, I will track my water intake, I will begin using the reminders app. A huge part of it, for me, seems to be the innate need to keep track of my history digitally and in a notebook.
As Joan Didion puts it:
“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself."
But journaling doesn’t feel compulsory anymore. It has felt difficult with the repetitive indoor life. It feels like in this moment of history it should be important to record the life I’m living, but if I think back to March, I feel like not much has happened. Maybe if I recorded my day-to-day, someday, some person might read it (barring the narcissism in this vision) and be interested in what someone’s boring, daily life was during the 2020-2021 pandemic. But it’s just a drag to sit down every day and write down things in my notebook. It’s similar to the feeling I have about pandemic cooking: ugh, where’s the joy in this?
My waterlogged 2017 notebook.
I think there’s the ideal note-taker I strive to be. I see artists’ notebooks and assume they must be the ideal notetaker: A person who is scribbling ideas in a notebook whenever they have them. Notebooks like Florence Welch’s Useless Magic, Jose Naranja’s, and Archaic Noctuary’s. The notebook of the ideal notetaker seems to always be in their pocket or at their side. It’s filled with tickets, photos, restaurant bills. As a writer, my ideal notebook and journaling mode would allow me to look into my journal and get inspiration at a moment’s notice. Maybe this is everyone’s ideal notebook, too: One can look inside their notebook and realize the answer is there.
When I looked at my journals from between 2012 and 2018, I am fascinated by how much I journaled, even when I thought I wasn’t journaling that much. I find I was journaling while I was waiting for appointments and interviews and wrote stories in these journals. I also asked people I had just met to write something in my journals. I have notes from ex-boyfriends, former friends, people who have faded into the background.
A note from a friend in 2012. A letter from another is tucked in behind it.
I used to carry around a small sack of fountain pens filled with different colors. My journal would have little daily entries in tiny cursive with different colors of wet ink. Now, I’ve graduated to just black ink to make it simple and easier to journal, and my pens stay tucked away in a drawer. My scribbles are big, disorganized, ever changing. Sometimes I’ll add a colored highlighter. Originally, I would collect and paste things into my notebook and create a sort of collage. It would be a mixture of colorful writing, washi tape, printed pictures, and things I’ve collected. Now, I’m just hopeful I’ll write something with one pen.
I watched Kogonada’s 2017 film Columbus and really enjoyed it. If you want a quiet, contemplative film and enjoy beautiful shots, I highly recommend it. My review is here.
I know the holidays are over but this Etsy commercial is good in the get-those-tears-going way.
Learning about Mary J. Wilson, Baltimore’s first black senior zookeeper, who passed away in 2020. “It is always a question, how much freedom a Black parent can give a Black child in this country that hates to see Black people free; freedom in that light is dangerous. But a sense of freedom is fundamental to raising a healthy being. And you can find freedom in extending radical care to others — human and animal. Wilson knew this.”
Anthony Hopkins video about celebrating 45 years of sobriety is so heartwarming!!
Julia Hart’s film I’m Your Woman. Really enjoyed all the characters and acting in this one.
Notes to Self: Essays by Emilie Pine. A very frank and genuine essay collection that is the kind of essay collection I always feel like I’m searching to read. It is very much in a similar vein to Alexander Chee in terms of reality and honesty. “It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic - raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding - but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed.”
Ben Affleck getting his Dunkin Donuts delivery is all of us.
500 Queer Scientists, a project to push for LGTBQ+ visibility in STEM where they post stories about these scientists out in the field.
