Tangible life

          Sometime in December, I started keeping a journal. It'd been a long time since I had kept one on paper - held together with thread and glue, not microchips. You know. Between covers.
          I guess part of it was that I felt that I needed to be more artistic. While my writing skills have improved, my crafting, artsy talents have fallen a bit to the side. I wanted to relearn my own handwriting. To collect scraps from papers, press flowers, glue in bits of tangible life between the pages.

          I've always been a little bit phobic about writing in journals. Real, bound journals. I felt, when I'd open the bright, white, clean pages and cracked that spine, that anything I wrote there would ruin the book. I used to (I say it in the past tense, though it's still an impulse I have to consciously and actively quell) buy journals all the time. I'd have one or two pages filled of one journal, and then buy a new blank one. I would st art out with these grand schemes - I'm going to write poetry in this one; I'm going to never rip a page out of this one; etc etc - but they never panned out.
          This Christmas, my friend bought me a journal/book by Keri Smith, called Wreck This Journal. Check it out.
          I have yet to wreck it. But I've started another journal - $3 from Borders. It has "MUSIC" written on the front, and it's actually filled with manuscript paper. I think this, along with the floppy, squashable covers, has made it easier to relax when I write. I don't feel like I'm destroying anything. Maybe this goes back to my childhood fear of writing in books.
          I'm still uncomfortable with marginalia (a term introduced to me by Anne Fadiman's book, "Ex Libris"). I take notes in textbooks, but not in books I read for pleasure. I understand the value in writing your thoughts down on the page - you come back to it and see how your perceptions have changed, note how you've grown. But, I feel like, instead of seeing change, those written notes would prevent me from gaining new insight. This is partly why, if a book particularly strikes me, I write down the quote or passage somewhere else (i.e. one of my myriad blogs) and reflect on it there. A commonplace book. That way, I have a record of my thoughts without sullying new readings of the old passage.

          But anyway - my journal.
          It's interesting keeping it up. I write in it during class, at work, in spare moments. It's already become eclectic, with scraps from magazines and ads I like (but haven't yet glued in), sketches, songs I've been working on in smudgy pencil, straight up accounts of my days, long passages of internal monologue in cramped and illegible handwriting, some film I ruined by accidentally popping open the back of my camera, ticket stubs, loose bits of paper I've scribbled on.
          I feel like it's really a record of my life. As opposed to something like this blog, which is a record of how I think about my life. No less valid, but different.

          It's slowly coming back into play, the art of diary-ing. People like Keri Smith are turning journaling into the new scrapbooking. Keeping a journal, beaten up and stuffed with miscellany, is so totally indie.