Trying my hand at freehand sketches. I have poor discipline, but once in a while I get the urge to practice drawing. There are many things I wish I could render in illustration (mainly because they are too perverse to ask anyone else to do for me), but I don’t feel the restless urge to spend hours at this task, even though that’s the only way to improve.
Still, I have fun with sketches.
As much as an individual can “make” a Moleskine notebook, I made this one. I covered it in expensive Japanese paper, decorated it with a kabuki label and a Blade Runner sticker. I use it to store my passwords, which means I can’t often leave it laying around for people to admire. It also means that someday I’ll have to throw it away: every time I update my passwords, I use new pages and march toward the end of the notebook. Eventually it will be full and therefore useless, no point to saving it but to look at.
I’m such an organizer.
I can’t stand it. This is such a consummately cute idea. Even if the artwork were poor—which it’s not! this is excellent!—the idea is so charming that I want to imitate it for a week. But the nature of my just-trying-to-get-by meals is not worthy of record, so I would have to go out of my way to eat better, or more interestingly, just to have something that merited my feeble artistic hand and diligent preservation.
I thought it meant something else entirely to be “in the doldrums,” but even so, it’s not entirely unrelated.
Theories and Observations
- People who crave free stuff all the time, no matter what it is, may also be the people who think drinking Red Bull is a good idea.
- Red Bull has to launch shrink-wrapped cars and pedestrians with backpacks to give their product away for free, to attract attention. Moleskine has never needed to do anything like this.
- Someone who can’t get any other job than to walk around and be a commercial is amply deserving of your pity for at least three reasons. Four.
My scrapbook from SE Asia. Everywhere we went, I saved brochures, business cards, flyers, receipts, all sorts of printed things and tried to group them in more or less chronological order, with handwritten notes and captions, to tell another kind of story of our trip.
Dreams Scattered Everywhere
Goddamn it! I keep finding dreams! I thought I was all caught up except for two more dream-fragments I recorded in the back of the journal. I’m seriously two sheets of paper away from the center of this journal, which is a lot of writing in a little time.
But then I found another notebook page yesterday with three dreams on it, two short and one lengthy bastard. I finally got those transcribed today, fleshed them out as well as I could (usually after a few glyphs it comes back to me, but these are too far in the past). So what do I discover in the back of another notebook? Three more damned dreams.
The fact that I’m finding them everywhere is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it means great, I’m very good at recording my dreams and I have more than I thought. On the other, I clearly lack any sort of system and will continue to stymie my own progress through my current methods.
It’s almost as though I need one formal dream journal, with everything written out nicely, and one smaller notebook in which I quickly crib the notes from what little I can recall the next morning, and the latter will feed the former. This is starting to sound (even to me) ridiculous.
Filling the Dream Journal
I’m keeping a dream journal. I think I’ve tried to long ago in the past but it didn’t take. This one came about because I’d started having really vivid dreams last February, and I could even recall them a couple days later.
It so happened that I’d purchased a pack of Moleskine large red Cahiers but had no purpose for them: they were only beautiful so I had to possess them. They sat around, pristine, in my apartment for nearly a year and then I found uses for them. One is my beer journal, wherein I record my misadventures with homebrewing, my tastes and judgment of commercial beer, and anything interesting I uncover in my studies (like a Sumatran prayer that is actually a beer recipe).
DIY Deco: Moleskine Notebooks
(Link in title) My blog post detailing past and current projects: customizing Moleskine notebooks. I’m particular about the materials I use, and other people can benefit from my trial-and-error learning process.
I’m working on some smaller, lined Moleskine pocket notebooks. I had this scrap paper left over for the covers. Inside the front cover, I’ve pasted a couple layers of this fine Japanese paper I picked up for a steal from Global Village and printed it with a linocut I carved: a two-tone image of Soja no Gorô Tokimune, a famous kabuki character. I’m not pleased with the conflation of the Chinese exterior and the Japanese interior, but I’m just working with what I have immediately on hand.
I’m pleased! I sold one of my decorated Cahiers tonight, and I got to reconnect with an old friend.
This is a large Moleskine Cahier, kraft cover, unlined. I covered it in a section of a 1965 National Geographic map, and on the insides I pasted pages from a Thai ghost comic book and a 1953 copy of German Through Pictures.
I’ve designed some Moleskine Cahier notebooks and am selling them on the Moleskine website.
