Learning to love again

So, after one too many conference calls one random Thursday morning, I bolted out the door into the California sun and wandered down to my favorite sandwich shop a few minutes early.  Not content to head right back to the office, I wandered into a nearby specialty office supply store.

And there, among the Holly Hobby sentiments and Rapidograph pens, was a neat stack of Miquelrius notebooks.  Maybe it was the fact that I had lived in Spain for a while, maybe it was the pattern the grid makes when the edges of the pages are splayed out slightly, maybe it was the soft feel of the cover, but I was instantly in love.  Not little puppy love, but full-on, hard-core, must-have-this-at-any-cost love.

I walked back to the office a new man, a kick-ass notebook tucked under my arm.  Not entirely by coincidence, I left that job several months later for newer, greener pastures.

There’s something about Miquelrius

Something about the notebook reminded me of the early days of the quality Steno pads.  The paper was nice and smooth, with a hint of texture that a good pen can subtly transfer to your fingers (although recently purchased books didn’t have that exact same quality - meh).  The cover is amazing, a leather-like substance that takes a lot of bending around without losing its shape.

The only problem with the cover is that, at arm’s length, the notebook looks suspiciously like a fat copy of a bible.  Since a good friend of mine works at Oakley, I added one of their stickers to the cover, so now it looks like a bible with an Oakley sticker on the cover. Or something.

I ended up choosing the grid rule.  First, it reminded me of the grid-ruled notebooks I used in school in Madrid, and that I’ve collected at school supply stores on my travels to Mexico, Brazil, and Japan.  But more importantly, I’ve found that standard horizontal rules actually reduce my freedom on the page - all of my writing tends to get pushed into a line-by-line monologue, rather than

being free to line up horizontally or vertically as it sees fit.

Learning to write again

Sitting there, notebook in hand, I got down to the task of moving myself back to paper.  I copied down my task list, some random thoughts I had started to accumulate, and a couple of Post-Its to the silky new pages.  But there was a problem: my fingers had nearly forgotten how to write, and my words splayed across the page like a half-awake four year old trying to put his jeans on inside out.

I used to be the guy in grade school with immaculate penmanship.  My father used to create fonts by hand, back before he retired.  I used to take pride in my handwriting, neatly forming every character even when filling out checks for the electric bill.  But it was no more.

It took me a good two or three days of writing to get back into a comfortable rhythm, and another week to move away from actively thinking about letter formation and back into letting the letters write themselves.  Several months into it all, I’m back