Monday, May 18, 2009

Wasting paper on the internet

I think that there are few things worse than journals with the word “journal” on the spine. This in inexcusable, even when the cover itself is old and leathery looking and the clasp might be made from an authentic arrowhead from the French and Indian War.

I admit to being a little emotional about paper-goods at times. This derives partially from my overwhelming and completely groundless nostalgia, and partially from my own heady and youthful desires to be a writer.

In my mind (and this is the mind that seriously considered looking up butter churns on amazon earlier) writers wrote in stern leather-bound books with ribbons for bookmarks. And no writer of my imagination was very silly enough to want the word “journal” embossed sloppily on the spine in Century Schoolbook font and so I’ve felt compelled to disdain this idea myself.

This tirade might actually have a point. So lately I have been trying to write in a more serious sense, and failing very miserably. I feel drastically unmotivated after getting home from work, and then I just have fits over not accomplishing anything. Really, it’s quite a drag. And I weirdly (okay, hypocritically) despair over how I was so productive in college, when all day long I curse college kids and their term-paper style melodrama and their Snow-Hoes and Eskimos parties.

“If only they knew,” I think to myself sitting in traffic. “When you become a working person there is no such thing as a free newspaper.”

And so I find myself being falsely motivated by the sirens of the paper world. I think to myself that maybe if there was a journal that wasn’t totally obvious about being a journal that I would buy it and become instantly more motivated and prolific as hell and my handwriting would probably be improved by sheer proximity to the thing.

But I know that if I were to find the perfect journal I would still be flakey and my handwriting would still be sloppy and the lines would start curving down and wasting expensive paper space before long. Hardbound journals are the most depressing thing in the check-out aisle of Barnes and Noble.

No comments: