Like most internetty people, I’ve had my share of I-should-get-around-to-blogging posts. This is not one of them, though I will take the time to mention that I am perfectly aware of the fact that:

  1. I didn’t follow through with my plan to blog from Spain and
  2. I haven’t blogged since.

Well, I haven’t blogged here. The good news is I’ve dropped the occasional post and podcast on the other sites I’m affiliated with.

What I have done, is begun that other endeavor that folks promise themselves they’ll do: journal.

It isn’t a great journal. Nor is it particularly insightful. Though I’ve read the reasons for writing journals, I’m not sure my reasons dovetail with those nicely. I’ll say that the final strike from the hammer was reading about Nina Simone’s diary.

I‘ve said before that my most frequent detour into procrastination is fiddling with the tools and settings of the task at hand. While it is useful in acquiring skills and future knowledge of things, it is easy to get lost in finding the ‘right’ tools for the job and forgetting to actually do the job.

It’s very GTGTG.

I’ve slowly accumulated a little stack of Moleskine notebooks. They are great. I like them1. I have a tic where I didn’t want to cross-contaminate the content of one with another. So I bought a couple more for other topics. Right now I have a school one, a podcast one, a UNT one, and a small general carry one. Nearing the end of life on a couple, I bought one more. The thing was I hadn’t found a good use for it. So it stayed in my bag for a week or so. Around the same time I read one of those sites where dudes are trying to pretend they live in 19102. Of particular interest was the fountain pen guide. I’ve been wanting a good reasonably priced fountain pen to write thank you notes, christmas cards, just some regular ol’ handwritten letters and the like.

Over the weekend I had finally received the $3 Jinhao pen from Amazon, and there sat the unused red Moleskine notebook. I decided I’d inadvertently got the tools and had ran out of excuses.

I’m only on the fourth entry but I see a nice routine beginning to form. The best way to start (or break) habits is to make it easy to do so. I put the damned notebook and pen right next to the table where I begin my workday. I also don’t put any pressure to make it a journalistic account of my life. I’m not writing my autobiography here. I’m sure I can piece together that stuff from the various social media items tracking my life. Or I’ll just ask the NSA.

Oh, and the fountain pen leaked all over a page. I replaced the cartridge and it seems okay but yeah. Sometimes the gear sucks.

  1. While I do like them enough to buy more, I like writing things. I really will have to talk myself out of buying a pen and a notepad. Don’t you love a good legal pad? Gawd. ↩

  2. I understand the appeal. Some of the things really do sound cool and a little bit from a forgotten time. I’ve heard speculation that it is a Lost Manly Art. That refrain, however, has been one repeated since Roman times. Hell, Teddy Roosevelt thought we men were becoming to feminized in the times we are glorifying now. Meh. ↩