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My totally awesome Moleskine notebook
By Ned | December 20, 2007
Last week, after I traded in some of my textbooks from this semester at the NYU bookstore for cash (including a few I never even opened that I was still told to buy at absurdly high prices, although that’s a common complaint among college students that nobody really wants to read), I spent a little bit of the resulting money on a Moleskine notebook. I do so for a few reasons:
- Practicality. That’s the big one, or at least the one I used to rationalize the purchase. I carry around a notepad with me everywhere but the cheap ones I used to use aren’t terribly sturdy and would usually come apart in my pocket. It’s a waste of pages when they just rip right off the spirals and end up clumped up in your laundry.
- They look cool and the people who use them look cool. As much as I’d like to act like this was entirely a rational, practical purchase, Moleskin notebooks do look cool. If you walk around scribbling plot points, band names, reading lists, quick sketches and random couplets in a cheap little spiral bound notebook you might seem a little weird. The Moleskine makes it classy though, not to mention all sensitive and artistic. In the interest of full disclosure, that has to get put out there.
- It will make me a better writer. Obviously, this last one is patently untrue. But that weird little superstitious part of me keeps making a big deal out of the fact that, hey, Hemingway had one of these things. So that must have been his secret. Either that or his badass facial hair.
Final verdict after a few days? Well, it does look cool. And it’s in pretty much the same condition as when I bought it. Sure that was only a few days ago, but my old spiral-bounds would generally start to decay in a matter of hours. So mission accomplished on both of those points.
As for being a better writer? A funny thing started to happen when I bought the notebook. I’ve been feeling more and more pressure to use it, seeing as I just spent around $10 on it. And I keep worrying about whether or not what I’m writing down is important enough or good enough to go in a $10 Moleskine notebook, meaning that I have to go back and refine the thought before I put it down (this post, for example, is a thought that would not make the cut in the notebook). So maybe I’m not becoming a better writer, but the things that I’m putting down in the notebook are better than they were before, which makes me feel better about my writing.
A couple of days ago I accidentally left it at a friend’s dorm. No harm, no foul, I picked it up the next evening. But in the intermittent time, I actually felt its absence in a way I wouldn’t if one of my old notebooks went missing. I had actual important thoughts written down in it and ideas occurred to me throughout the day that I was itching to write down in the notebook instead of just mentally filing away because I was too lazy to write it down.
That sort of thing didn’t used to happen, but it seems like an unambiguously positive development to me. When I fill up this Moleskine notebook, I’m going to save it in a drawer and go out and buy a new one.
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