Starting Fresh

…with my new notebook! Today, after a snarky note from my friend Kelly on its final page, I retired my most recent moleskine that I began writing in on April 16th of last year. I love starting a new moleskine, because it’s fun seeing how far I’ve come and how much I’ve done. My moleskine, as most of you know, is my life. I keep journal entries, class notes, color-coded To-Do lists, poetry snippets, fiction excerpts, and more in it, and if I ever lost it I would go into full-blown panic mode. I am actually so attached to my moleskine that last semester, when my creative nonfiction professor had to take it to check off that I’d been writing in it and I was going through a particularly tumultuous time in my life, I actually started writing in the new journal ahead of schedule.

November 1st, 2012 entry in what I consider my “new” journal:

“So after the next couple of days I won’t be writing in this particular moleskine until I finish my other, as-of-yet unfinished one. But the current moleskine is in my Creative Non-Fiction prof’s hands for a grade and I won’t get it back until Monday but I can’t stand not having a journal before that because I feel like I’m drowning in suck.”

That part of the entry makes me laugh a lot, and then it gets kind of sad and ranty and you don’t need to hear that bit, but the point is: my moleskine is my life. I think I’ve amassed six over the past three or four years, which is cool, because they look neat and uniform on my shelf but then you open them up and get to see whole different sections of my life. For example:

My last journal’s first entry was April 16th, like I already mentioned, and was a page of To Do lists.

“To Do Today:

-Email Walls back

-Buy milk and DVRs

-Burn movie for Colton (w/ cooking w/ gandalfs?)

-Write poetry essay

        -plan in class

-Pick up TV

-Tutoring application”

I love this to-do list. “Buy milk and DVRs”. I even underlined milk because it was imperative I get it ASAP, apparently.

The first actual thing I wrote in this journal that wasn’t a list was as follows, on the same day:

“A rant about spelling. What a fun way to start class. I have other things to do- better things to do. You are a pretentious a**hole and I don’t care what you have to say.

Sparse=good? How droll.”

I’m not going to say more on that count because of reasons. Ahem.

Anyways, this journal basically started with a series of increasingly angry entries about a particular class/professor, continued with probably 20 poem drafts, several pages of NaNoWriMo planning, and a short story draft almost in its entirety, and ended with some free-writing from my fiction class and my one month anniversary with Quinn. Funny how life works sometimes, huh?