I succumbed to Moleskine and spent RM60 plus on the Moleskine Soft Cover Plain Notebook (large). Moleskine has The Star to thank for my upgrade from their cahiers (I’m on my second set) to this notebook. The Star on Sunday 18th very conveniently offered a 25% discount voucher for all moleskines at Kinokuniya, so……how could I resist? I was also influenced by Daniel Price’s cute handwritten book on journalling – and the sketches he includes in his make me feel like drawing again, hence the plain paper version.
Mr Price also offers one piece of good advice – fill up your journal with life affirming stuff, he says, good things that you see about the world and the people around you, and relegate sufferings (“exorcises”, heh!) to lesser notebooks. Hmmm…. that could be why only two pages of my new notebook is filled.
Kidding.
Really.
On a serious note (oh, I was already, wasn’t I?), the notebook has such beautiful, smooth, blank paper that I was loathe to mar it with my imperfect writing. The second page was much easier to fill. And I do love the soft, pliant cover, and the elastic keeps everything together beautifully.
It’s well worth the RM60, but because of its nature, I think twice about what I stuff between its covers, which can be a good thing or a bad thing.
The moleskine is not the only notebook/journal I have recently purchased. Because writing has become more important to me in the past year, I also purchased Doreene Clement’s 5-year Journal; it’d be pretty cool to be able to a “Today in History” comparison, albeit within a five year perspective, and depending on whether I will still be alive a year, or two, or five years from now.
With death in mind, I also bought a journal specifically to be passed on to the children after I’d passed on. A Mother’s Legacy is – heavy on the pre-packaging (as only American commercialism can be), but I rather like the questions it poses. The most difficult bit is to write out the answers, of course.
Despite the three beautiful books to fill, I am still writing on bits and pieces of paper, stuffed here and there in various hiding nooks and crannies. My cahiers are still repositories of passages and snatches of narratives, along with observations. And then there is this blog - the public face for my textual jaunts.
Is this all overkill?
It could be.
But I recently came back from an international archivist congress, and the point that was driven time and time again during the course of the congress, is that records do matter and observations can tell a story that could be of interest to someone, somewhere, years down the road.
If my words can help my kids - even if it’s just one of them – cope with the world better, that’s good enough for me.
Filed under: Personal Note, Writing , moleskine, notebook, Writing
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