I love notebooks. I love the promise of the fresh blank pages. I love carrying one around so that it’s always at arm’s reach if I want to jot something down.
Anyhow, tonight I was looking for a notebook to write something in, and in the in the course of poking around, I discovered that all my notebooks seem to be about half full. I never fill them. I abandon them half finished. I can’t help but feel there’s a message about my life in general in there somewhere.
Half a pile of notebooks.
Of course, I ended up gathering my various notebooks for the past 8 years or so together to see how well that 50% principle held. It made for an interesting trip through the past few years of my life.
From oldest to most recent:
Description: Coil bound, with a Buddha on the front.
Origin: gift from my mom
Date: 1999
Contents: A journal I kept while on a high-school trip to Europe.
Amount used: 80% full.
Reason I stopped using it: I came back from Europe.
Excerpt: (from our day spent looking in tourist shops in the Spanish town of Lloret de Mar): A pushy shop guy tried to sell me a half-price leather jacket for 7000 pts. I declined, and he told me he could give me a better deal because his boss was out to lunch. I was tempted, but decided that I didn’t like the funny criss-cross pattern and plastic zipper. As soon as I lost interest, the price started coming down and the pressure started going up. Eventually we fled the store, with the salesman’s frantic shouts of “My boss is out to lunch!” ringing in our ears. The price was down to 3500 pts, or about $35 Canadian by then. As we stepped on to the street, another salesman at the front of the store offered to cut the price yet farther. Andrew was pretty sure he hadn’t even been following our conversation with the first salesman and didn’t even know what he was offering to sell us, only that he was going to give us a deal.
Description: Marbled green cover.
Origin: I think I bought it, can’t really remember.
Date: 2000-2002
Contents: A mixture of notes, story fragments, journal entries, video game ideas.
Amount used: Hard to estimate because I tended to just open it to a random blank page and start writing. I’d say about 50%.
Reason I stopped using it: because of the lack of organization, finding anything in it eventually became difficult and it seemed like a good idea to just get a new notebook.
Excerpt: On one page dated “June 8″ I wrote “Beware of invisible cows!”
Description: Basic black composition book
Origin: I bought it
Date: 2002-2003
Contents: Served as my “writing journal” during the creative writing course I took at Mount A. Mixture of musings and story fragments.
Amount used: 50%
Reason I stopped using it: The writing course ended and I felt I had worn out my creative-writing muscles.
Excerpt: Nov 11/02. In the library, mucking about with God, Spinoza and Free Will while waiting for Basse & Von Gelder [ed: an algorithms text-book on course-reserve]. Need to finish my re-write. The rest of the class have done some nice things with theirs. Being in here, in the quiet , with the shuffling and murmurs of other working students and the occasional, almost musical whine of the saw from the construction site outside, I’m reminded of the “bone hoard” level of [the computer game] Thief: large catacombs, ghostly music, wailing undead, not-quite-silent-enough silence. My creative impulses at the moment are towards writing D&D adventures… fantasy appeals to me more than it should these work-heavy days.
Description: Basic navy blue composition book
Origin: I probably bought it
Date: 2004-2005
Contents: Journal, research-meeting notes, computer game ideas, early work on my thesis.
Amount used: 50%
Reason I stopped using it: I stopped doing a lot of things in the summer of 2005.
Excerpt: “I can think of a cat, or I can think of a trillion fundamental particles” – Dave, my research mate.
Description: Brown journal with Chinese characters on it.
Origin: Gift from dad
Date: 2005-2006
Contents: Thesis brainstorming and journal.
Amount used: 50%
Reason I stopped using it: Not sure. I think because I went to Greece and took a different notebook instead.
Excerpt: Oct 24, 2005: I’m reading Alfred N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason: “Plato and Ulysses. The one shares Reason with the Gods, the other shares it with the foxes.”
Description: Purple.
Origin: Gift from Jenn and Martha
Date: 2006
Contents: a little creative writing, my journal from Greece and Toronto.
Amount used: 40%
Reason I stopped using it: I came back from Greece?
Excerpt: Heraklion – March 29/06
I’m sitting on the wall of a Venetian fortress looking out to sea. It’s my second full day on Crete, and the first time I’ve had a chance to pick up my pen. I am, as Andrew predicted, sitting on a ruin, pen in hand, thinking of what to write, of where to begin.
Heraklion is wonderful: a sun-soaked city of 200,000, uneven, angular, flat-roofed buildings piled up on the crumbling walls of the old fortified city. The streets are narrow and winding, and mostly one-way. Every building sports a multitude of balconies at every point.
The fortifications are all relatively new: at her height, Crete was such a fierce naval power that her inhabitants rarely bothered to fortify on land. This was not because they lived in peaceful times: ancient Crete was at war with her neighbours more than any other Greek state.
Description: Black with a white apple sticker stuck on the front.
Origin: I bought it
Date: 2006-present
Contents: Journal, thesis stuff, other research stuff.
Amount used: about 25%
Reason I stopped using it: I haven’t…yet…
Excerpt: Sept 14/2006
The other reason not to grow up: you lose your sense of invulnerability. What good is a young person that does not believe he can conquer the world?
I can see my notebooks right there! :) I always tend to fill them up to half and then just leave them. But then again, when I need them, I just start to write from the back :P
I tend to lose my use of notebooks due to urge of adding stuff. I always have something more to add after I finished it and there’s usually no room for it. That’s why I write more in damn MS Word then in my notebooks.
Anyhow, interesting subject, and I could be we all have those kind of notebooks.
I know what you mean. I have a lot of “half-filled” files on my hard drive as well.
Great topic and photos, Ian. I think it’s fantastic that you don’t fill your notebooks, and look at it as a response to your last excerpt. Unfilled journal pages can represent the unfilled life we have left to live. Live on, my friend.