Journaling

I Call This The Intro

Writing stuff down for me is a multifaceted thing.  One, it allows me to remember the things that have happened.  You'd be hard pressed to get me to recall the things that happened last week, much less a year ago.  Two, journals are pretty.  Sometimes.  Occasionally you'll see these massive Filofaxes crammed full of who knows what, but I don't think those are as popular as they once were.  Otherwise, you'll see these nice English or Japanese journals that really are beautiful.  Three, it's more gear for me to have, which I've touched on before.  And four, hand cramps.

It's also one of those interests that I picked up and had to fulfill.  Now, I have a taste for the nicer things, like the Midori Travelers Notebook.  Or the Hobonichi Techo.  You'll notice these are both Japanese.  That is pure coincidence.  Kind of.

And This Is Another Section

The Midori Travelers Notebook, commonly abbreviated to MTN (but never pronounced MiTteN), is a thing of beauty.  Vegetable tanned leather, sourced from...cows I guess.  I wanted to say something clever there, but it's cows.  Thai cows I think.  Anyways, it's as simple as can be.  A piece of leather, an elastic band to hold the inserts inside, and the inserts.  Inserts come in many varieties.  Blank pages, lined pages, calendars, the list goes on.  The real draw for me is the leather.  It ages beautifully, and smells amazing.  There is a smaller size, the Passport version.  It fits passports, which makes sense I guess.  I own both.

The Hobonichi Techo, or the Hobonichi Planner as it is called in English, is a different affair.  It's a planner in its most basic form.  It contains a year overview, monthly pages, weeks, etc, but the meat of the planner is it has a page for every day.  Even Saturday and Sunday.  There are two versions (not counting the larger counterpart), the English and the Japanese version.  The only true difference is the language they are presented in, and the other differences are small and not really enough to justify buying one over the other,

These aren't too expensive, initially, but if you desire you can easily rack up around $400 in one go on the official shop.  The planner itself is only about $20 USD.  The covers, of which there are plenty to choose, range from $15 to $300 or so.  Each year there are special year specific covers, which adds a bit of collect-ability to journal.

As an interesting side note, the Hobonichi was developed by Shigesato Itoi, a prolific writer and video game developer.  His real claim to fame, outside of Japan, is the Earthbound (Mother in Japan) series of video games.

This Part is About Money

All that costs money.  Potentially a lot of money.  The sky is the limit for both the MTN and the Hobonichi.  However, you don't have spend a small fortune to write stuff down.  The cheapest method would be to do it all digital.  You could start a humorous and sexy blog as one example.  There is really no limit to the ways in which the digital can be used.  Google Drive, um...Google Drive is good.  Just go with that.  The point is, there is literally a whole internet out there for you to record your thoughts on.

That just isn't romantic enough.  You want to end up with a creepy library like the guy from Se7en.  You want all the composition notebooks lined up on a wall, inviting people to ask "you write this?"  That's a dumb question.  Of course you did!  And these things are cheap.  Around the start of school time, Walmart basically gives them away.  You walk in there, buy some pencils, they don't even offer you a bag at checkout.  They wrap it all up in composition notebooks*.  Buying delicate, fine China?  They protect it with composition notebooks*.

Still doesn't suit your fancy?  Well, with all the free composition notebooks you lifted from work and grabbed at Walmart, take the saved money and buy a nice leather cover for them.  Etsy has a bunch of these things available.  Also, grassroots leather shops on the internet love to hustle these things too.

This is the End

Well, the end of this article.  Go write something.  It's fun, helps you blow off steam, makes you look smart.  Seriously, go someplace where smart people hang out.  The library or that bar downtown.  You know the one, the one where they have a string quartet on Saturdays.  Go in there, write something down, people will buy you drinks.  Ask you big questions like the nature of the universe or where babies come from.

Have you found a cool way to put your thoughts on paper?  Have a special way or place you like to write?  Let us know!

*Walmart doesn't actually give them away.  I just wrote that to be funny.  If you didn't laugh, or at least chuckle, well, who is really to blame?