Hit Parade 1: Moleskine Journals

So I finally started journaling a couple of years ago. I'd always wanted to keep a journal even when I was in high school. It seemed like anyone who had ever done anything interesting kept a journal or diary of some sort. I made several attempts over the years to write my thoughts down every night, and I failed consistently. I felt foolish and self-conscious. I felt like I had to write down something that was "worth" writing down. So my words came out maudlin or bombastic or empty. I tried in college. I tried in early adulthood. I tried in notebooks. I tried on the computer. Writing always just felt forced and awkward and lame.

I finally realized I could just write down what happened that day. Just that and nothing more. No pressure to be brilliant or artful. I could write down what I obsessed over. And I could write down my then-current goals. Right then I started writing pages of stuff. It's all crap. Boring as boring could be and certainly not art or artful. But it 's nice to read back through the book and remember what I thought as I wrote the words on the page. So now iI have an easy time writing in my journal. I'm kind of obsessive about it. It's a mini-catharsis at the end of the day.

In a roundabout way, this brings me to the Moleskine. They have great branding. They talk about Hemingway and Chatwin using notebooks that inspired the current brand. They talk about creativity and inspiration and have some great galleries of the kind of art and writing people do in their books. They have a plain black cover. They lay flat when you open them. The paper is nice and works well as a writing surface. And they're even moderately priced (as you'll see in some subsequent posts).

I'm a sucker for good, premium branding. So I bought one. It's got a really nice feel. The problem is that I hesitated to just *use* the damn thing. Would my mundanity live up to the legacy of the notebook?

Here's where my ridiculousness comes in. Is it the best journal I could use? Are they wasteful? Shouldn't I buy a journal with a nice cover that takes refills? Could I possibly get a better journal for a lower price? (Answers are, in order: How do I define "best journal"? Any paper journal is wasteful to some degree, but if I use it then it's not wasted. I could buy a nicer journal with refills, but it won't improve my writing. Not really, any journal with decent paper in a 5 x 8ish size will cost $10-$20 for roughly 200 pages.)

So, this is all a way of leading into a baseline comparison for the other journal-type items I'm going to list up here. This way you can see where I'm starting from when I talk about the other items.

Ratings -

Ridiculousness of actual item: low

Ridiculousness of marketing: high

Cost: $16 for a 240 page 5.5 x 8.5 hardbound journal

Coffee/ Plane ticket equivalence: 16 coffees from 7 Eleven or 8 from Starbucks