Bullet points
I would say that it is in my top five things when looking for a new job… low likelihood of death.
I have a high self-preservation personality… coupled with more than a little cowardice.
Still that hasn’t prevented me from a few close brushes with the grim reaper. I have broken bones, I’ve been electrocuted, I’ve narrowly avoided being squashed by a van and I’ve had some truly gruesome paper-cuts.
So I have great respect (and a little suspicion) for journalists, especially those that like to get in the thick of it. Without people like that I wouldn’t know half the awful things I do.
The only similarity I can imagine between myself and someone that is willing to stroll around an artillery peppered no-man’s land just to tell everyone how it is going, is that we have a thing for notebooks.
Laptops are fine, but I think they’re probably not best suited to a conflict environment. Whereas pen and paper operate in pretty much any condition.
I think the rate of note taking is measured in the units of moleskines per year, but isn’t necessarily specific to that rather famous brand. Indeed, Ben and Roo happened to mention that they have used waterproof notebooks, perfectly acceptable…
…unlike the bad habit of just writing ideas on scraps of paper. The concept of writing something so delicate and easy to misplace on something that also displays those qualities is a crime.
So then, the anticipated responses to this are:
- What is your MPY?
- Your preferred note taking materials
- A full and frank confession concerning the information you have lost from writing it somewhere inappropriate. Leniency may be shown, but don’t expect it.
I only use about 3 MPY because I have an idiotic tendency to write things on post-it notes (which I then lose). Mostly, I like using spiral notebooks, but for portability I use the moleskine. As for the lost info… 7 years ago I wrote a love/hate letter to an ex-boyfriend that was never meant to be delivered. He still has it and to this day I’m annoyed that it hasn’t been destroyed.
Post-its like to wander… it’s in their nature…
But we’ll let you off since the story of the love/hate letter (great term) indicates you have suffered enough at the hands of rambling paper.
1. Mil per Year? what? im sorry what?
2. A lovely well worn moleskin, blank paper. Although i am looking for a stifflexible, if you can find somewhere to get them from.
3. I once got stranded at an airport on South Island, NZ all because I wrote the day of my flight on the back of a luggage tag, then promptly, almost in the same motion, threw said tag into the a bin. But lessons learnt, now every scrap of information is recorded and duley catalogued for future scratchings.
Stifflexible?
That is both horrible, and also hilarious. I’m sorry that it happened, but it’s good that you learned your lesson. I still write down important information on scrap paper.
One of the most handy and versatile notebooks is most definitely the Stifflexible.
Joel, we carry the complete line of Stifflexibles. You can find our store at http://www.lacouronneducomte.nl and, of course, we ship worldwide.
Hope to be of service!
Hi there La Couronne du Comte,
This nearly got flagged as spam… but after checking out your site, you seem legitimate, so I’ll let this stand… you certainly seem to have a fair selection of notebooks and writing implements.
1. Moleskines per year? 1 and a half so far. The half is actually a moleskine! Can I take this moment to say how much I love moleskines? I love them a whole damn lot. The paper is just really fantastic!
2. Definitely my moleskine right now (that was a surprise wasn’t it?). I have a hard cover one, which I really like. Mostly because I don’t have a side preference. Usually I always prefer to write on the right side of a journal, and I hated the left side. Only with this notebook I don’t really care, which is awesome.
My current favourite pen is one that I stole from my grandmother. Shhh, don’t tell her!
3. I lost my list of references and their contact information because I wrote it on a scrap of paper and then folded it in to a small square. I don’t know why I did that, but it sucked when I applied for jobs and had to call people again and look completely unorganized.
I always carry a small, spiral bound notebook with some loose sheets of folded paper tucked inside and a Zebra “Sarasa” pen held in the spine. I go through maybe one of these notebooks a year, so I have no idea what that translates to in MPY.
I use the loose paper for rough work, and the notepad itself for finished ideas. I tend to write in point form using a dense shorthand. Over the years I’ve lost some good ideas that were written on the loose paper, but fortunately enough I can’t remember what they were so I have no regrets.
Can’t say I’ve ever used mole skin.
Oh yeah. Hi I’m Dan. I’ve been reading this for about 4 or 5 days now, finished the archives yesterday or the day before, I forget. ANYWHO!
I suppose I too use loose bits of compressed trees from work, random pieces of paper that find their way to my desk… quite often my own skin becomes a nice reference, a bad habit i developed in school when I would forget my notebook at home.
Its quite funny to have your boss ramble at you, then stop and look when he sees you writing all the way to your elbow…..
Hi Dan,
Hope you liked rummaging through the archives… they’re getting pretty big now.
I hadn’t considered skin writing… I’m not sure where I stand on that. my initial instict is to say that it is wrong, mostly becuase of the temporary nature of the system…
…but, visually, I quite like it. And practically too, you can’t lose your arm so easily.
So, to your elbow… that’d make it a quarter sleeve. nice.
Remember though, writing on your arm is art, writing on someone elses is gaffiti… which is cooler.
You’ld be amazed at how hard it is to write on someone elses arm… first you have to figure out how to do it, you can either, A wait for them to pass out at a party(very hard when you’re in the middle of a work day) B convince them its a good idea through logic and peer pressure, which doesn’t always work, or my favorite, C strap them down and let you and your friends loose on them with a sharpie. With enough people C almost never fails.
My friends and I all write/draw on each other.
Usually it’s quite inappropriate.
Pictures of Mary, mother of Jesus getting impregnated by an angel do tend to be.
my friends tend to be a little more hesitent when i want to draw on them…. perhaps I’m hanging out with the wrong people.
and wow….. I mean, i enjoy a good blasphemy… but… wow…
Doesn’t everyone enjoy a little blasphemy?
Would you mind if I co-opted that image idea for some band-related art…?
http://www.myspace.com/fleshsocket
Roo - Haha, go for it! You’re more than welcome!
Dan - That was the general reaction of a good many people.
It made us laugh a lot.
Perhaps we just have extremely bad taste.
Blasphemous… isn’t that actually what happened according to the bible? I mean they didn’t use blatant words, but i always assumed that recieving the holy spirit was pretty much doing ‘it’.
I almost universally use my computer to take notes now because I’m a recluse so I’m always right by it. When I was in school I used to use cheap spiral notebooks, no particular brand except if at all possible I like to get the same kind I got the last time, since that’s what I’m used to. I still have all my old notebooks from school and I have them set up on my bookshelf in chronological order which means I have pretty much a library of every stray thought I had from 9th grade to when I dropped out of college. I expect to get back into that habit when I go back unless by then I can afford a laptop.
I recently had all of my old school notes delivered to my house – my parents are having their loft converted and found them up there.
Turns out, I didn’t do much at school other than sketch my own ideas.
My chemistry book is actually full of experiments that I could perform on my classmates… such as testing their individual affinity for oxygen… many of these experiments ended in the death of at least one of them…
If you ever need some time off from updating, you can now just post a page from your high school notebook and claim it as experimental art. It’d be cooler to post a page from your notes transcribed onto someone else’s arms, though.
Here here! I second that motion.
1. about two a year since highschool, but they are pretty hefty spiral notebooks.
one per year prior to that, with two pages a week. i had to choose carefully what i put in there…
2. high school diaries up until my final year. bastards changed the things - threw me completely.
3. i wrote a girl’s number on a friend’s arm… unfortunately he had a shower before we’d sobered up.
I don’t edit, on any level, the things I write in my notebook, perhaps that’s why I churn through them. It also makes them a little unsafe for public consumption.
“i wrote a girl’s number on a friend’s arm…”
I think, if the rules of friendship are true, that you have the legal right to amputate your friend’s arm to stop that ever happening again.
1: I go thru a larger number of note books then I actually fill because…
2: My prefered note book is as stated, water proof note books, which are, unfortuently, spiral bound.
3:This leads to them loosing pages, getting twisted, etc.
My books get so dirty that opening and shaking them out, yields about a tablespoon of coal dust.
I recently had to do a report for our mining engineer on the stats of a gas drainage hole, only to find that half my notes were illedgible or missing.
I also would like to see some of these school time sketches.
Probably about two or three little moleskins per year, and another two or three larger books. but it’s mostly pictures, not words. And then if you cut up all the bigger pictures and made them into moleskin sized books… maybe 8 per year?
I’ve never used a moleskine, but from the sounds of them, they are pretty exciting. Maybe I’ll look into getting one.
I don’t use a lot of paper notebooks. My ideas rarely come to me in half-formed states, but rather they spring fully-formed all at once and so they can be translated directly into whatever I was going to write. I tend to write on looseleaf on a clipboard, or else on my computer, and I pretty much always have one or the other handy.
Oh, crap: most embarrassing lost notes. Um… none, really. I have the opposite problem: I’ll find some scrap of paper, corner of an envelope, sticky note, crammed into my wallet whenever I clean it out with someone’s name or phone number, or an address, and I’ll wonder what importance it once had.
Oh, this whole thing reminds me of my brother: he had a horrible habit of taking notes on his hand… he’d write important dates, to-do lists, anything really. And he was getting to a point in his career where such unsightly things were noticed. Finally he bought a nice day planner (might have been the moleskin one, I don’t remember), but he still wrote on his hand! It was just too much of a habit.
So he, in the end, wrote “USE PLANNER” on the back of his hand, and carefully traced over it again every morning in permanent ink, so that when he went to write on his hand, he’d be reminded to put it in his planner instead.
Smart move.
How permanent?
Very permanent?
Not so smart.
I don’t let anyone see my notebooks. They contain thoughts that I wouldn’t want people to see.
That being said, I’ve lost many a thought I wanted to retain for later viewing through my careless useage of said notebooks. They get wet and covered in mud and twisted and bent and generally abused. Or pages get stolen. I’m sure they do. I’ve never caught anyone, but I suspect it.
I think using stone tablets instead of notebooks should solve the majority of your problems there.
It sounds like you are more of a diarist that a notist… I’m quite happy to show anyone the contents of my books… so long as they don’t repeatedly ask the question ‘what does that mean?’.
Hey! Look what I found!
http://fiveprime.org/hivemind/Tags/art,moleskine
The internet is wonderful…