Recently Joel bought a couple more Moleskine products. One is for jotting down work ideas and planning, and the other is for writing a journal to Zoe, which I think is incredibly sweet. Even better than the sentiment is that he is actually writing to her, mostly about their activities and time spent together on a day to day basis. Some day Zoe will appreciate this as a priceless treasure.
Anyone who has had a journal before probably knows the dilemmas faced when beginning them, especially if one happens to be a little bit OCDP. Do you write on the first page? What is the first entry? How do you handle errors? And what if the journal should become lost – how will it find its way back to you? Sometimes contemplating the answers to such pressing questions prohibits journaling altogether, as has been the case with both of us in the past. So let me say that I am proud of Joel for having figured it out and for doing this very special thing for his daughter.
But it is very, very funny to me how he handled the contact information conundrum. He asked me what details should be included, and we decided that a web and/or email address would probably suffice; phone numbers are too unreliable given our pending move and our dislike of phones in general. That’s all that was said.
Then today I found a paper while tidying up that speaks to my husband’s true crazy. All over both sides of a white sheet of paper, in all different directions, were various combinations of the information we had discussed. Joel had practiced writing his contact information no fewer than seven times. He had even created new email addresses specifically for the purpose of being contacted should his journal ever be lost and then found.
There really shouldn’t be any shame in mental illness. I mean, we’re all crazy here. And truth be told, I admire his dedication to getting it right. He’s correct: as he told me when I confronted him with the paper, you only get one chance to write your contact information in a journal.
Love it! I can totally understand and respect that! 🙂
That is Awesome! A little crazy is always a good thing in my
bookjournal 😉so yeah i tried to make a joke…my code wasn’t on board lol…have a good one 🙂
Hahaha – I got it though. 🙂
This brought a tear to my eyes. *another proud mother moment* What a precious gift for Zoe to have.
I remember incidents of Joel and the girls all coming home from school at various times, disgruntled that their middle and high school English teachers were upset that their computer generated first drafts were never rough enough (unfortunately implying they weren’t doing the work entirely by themselves when they actually were). To appease the teachers, I suggested they write however they like, mess it up, turn it in, and save the original first draft for the second draft. This, or writing first drafts by hand during class, seemed to stop the complaints — but it always created wasted effort (for them and their teachers) to “dumb it down” for first drafts.
They are all such good writers. And so smart. 🙂
That is why I have so many journals and none of them have more than a few pages filled out. I always write in pen because 1) it looks nicer and 2) pencil will eventually smear and be illegible. But then, it bleeds through the paper OR I make a mistake. If I mess up or my writing looks sloppy, then I can either cross it out (which looks so messy and ruins the perfectness) or use white-out (which is crusty and usually, I’ll mess up and cover up a word or line unintentionally). If I decide my entry was stupid or it looks crappy, I HAVE to get rid of the pages. Unless it spiral, this isn’t easily done.
That is why I blog online. If you mess up, just backspace. If I don’t like the entry, delete it. But I really do wish I could do it in a journal. Congrats Joel on figuring it out.