NoteBooks

I was straightening out my things today and realized that I've accumulated quite a pile of notebooks. You'd think that in this techno-driven age the notebook would be an outdated thing of the past. But I've grown to love my notebooks. I think I've filled up quite a number since 2004: I've got the two tiny ones that I use to record the details of mundane happenings. The first was even featured on this blog as a strange romp in the weird imaginative universe of Limitlim. The second is now mostly filled with driving directions, calorie counts and places to bring people when they visit little ol' Lansing. (It's also an overpriced "I-don't-believe-you-paid-that-much-money-for-a-few pieces-of-paper-sewn-together" Moleskine ...)

As for bigger work related notebooks, I think I filled in about five or six hundred pages worth of notebooks while I was doing coursework. I've noticed that a lot of people take classes without needing to jot things down but note-taking has always been a security blanket for me. I've got small handwriting too so the wall of words looks pretty cool when the blanks are all filled in. The first notebook that I used here in the U.S. is quite funny because I was trying to save space. I managed to write really densely -- doubling the lines of text for each ruled line in some instances. (I later found cheap notebooks -- from India, thus further internationalizing my academic endeavors -- in the dollar stores along 125th street ...)










While studying for the Orals I took another two hundred pages of notes (in addition to typing out about two hundred more pages of more coherent reading reports for the consumption of my Committee). I reckon that these pages will come in useful when I begin to teach this material and so my students to be will be treated to dusty spiral bound pages flipped to and fro as I search out that elusive insight that I'm sure I recorded. And no I do not love MSU -- it just was the notebook on sale at the bookstore here when I ran out and needed a new one. Essentially, I've used spiral bound notebooks during my time here: they're are quite convenient except that they leave an imprint on one's writing hand and sometimes turn inconsistently if they're poorly made. I had one where the metal spiraling kept come loose and I always had to struggle with it to pull it out of my bag as the wiring would get caught in fabric.

As for the latest addition to my family of notebooks, I got myself a nice Miquelrius notebook (Mine's a "flexible" leather notebook). It was a bit of a splurge (I'm too embarrassed to confess to how much it cost) and it really looks like a Moleskine imitation -- with elastic band and all. It's a nice thick notebook (300 pages -- and breaking it in I've realized that it's really hard to write on the verso side of the pages because it's still so fat on one end ... ) and should last me the dissertation.

I like notebooks.