JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Moleskine, we’re through. I have been a loyal Moleskine user since 2006, and I have enough Moleskines to pad the walls of my apartment. I have written entire books in Moleskines.

The high price of your notebooks I can endure, though it seems more and more ridiculous given the prices of other notebooks of comparable quality whose paper is better than yours. But for years, despite our entreaties, you have been putting out Limited Edition notebooks in lined paper only, with NO PLAIN PAPER options.

I DO NOT LIKE LINED PAPER. This world has enough rules as it is. So goodbye, Moleskine, I loved you, but IT’S OVER.

The price of this entire stack of 13 notebooks from Muji and Miniso with blank pages is less than the price of a single Moleskine notebook. Their paper is as good as the paper Moleskine uses.

The Twisted books are out of print so it’s time to make new ones. I just finished writing a long account of my trip to the Czech Republic, which reminded me that I have over a decade’s worth of travel notebooks, most of them unpublished. There’s enough of them to fill a large bag.

Chuvaness gave me this shopping bag last year, which is how I learned of the existence of Opening Ceremony haha.

Everything is in longhand so now I have to type it all up and edit it. That, or find a really good OCR app.

Interested publishers, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.

Illustration by Anne Tamondong

Yesterday I organized my journals, meaning I collected them from wherever they were scattered and put them in a trunk and in a big plastic box (there’s a lot of them). I found my journal from mid-2015, a leather notebook I got from Papers and Tschai, a handmade studio in Cebu.

In it was an account of my cat Mat’s last day. Since he had fallen ill a week earlier, he had been very weak and sleeping in the kitchen. On his last day, I was awakened at 6:30 in the morning by something fluffy landing on my feet. It was Mat, who had used his last burst of strength to walk to my room. I knew then that he didn’t have long, so I stayed with him all day and tried to make him comfortable. At 8:08pm, he breathed his last.

There was no place to bury him, so I asked my friend Tina if I could bury Mat the following morning in her garden. Then I wrapped Mat in one of my old T-shirts and put him in a box. The janitor wrapped him up some more and we put the box in the lobby where the guard could watch it overnight.

I went to bed at midnight, exhausted. At 2:45am I dreamed that someone was pounding furiously on the door. I woke up, but there was no knocking. In the morning I noticed that the welcome mat had been moved.

I like to think that Mat was trying to get back in the house, or maybe the angel of death had come to collect my firstborn male cat. (I’m sure it wasn’t a Pet Sematary scenario because Koosi and the neighbors’ dogs are all buried around here, and none of them came back.) Mat was a sweetie. The next day we couldn’t get a taxi to take us to Tina’s place (pre-Uber) so Juan lent me his car and driver. So Mat arrived in an SUV (according to witnesses, he leapt out of one and ran to my building) and left in an SUV. He was a sosyal cat.

(It’s getting longer and longer.)

(more…)

Read Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety in Brain Pickings.

From 100 Days of Overthinking by Maria Sanoja

Dear Moleskine,

As a loyal Moleskine user I am dismayed that your recent Limited Edition notebooks (Avengers, Beatles, etc) are available with ruled pages only. Consider that many of the people who shell out uncomplainingly for your expensive merchandise are the sort of people who appreciate the freedom of plain, unlined pages. I am close to deserting Moleskine for Leuchtturm 1917 or those Romeo spiral notebooks by Itoya, both of which have pristine, heavier paper. Only habit and my preference for seeing rows and rows of notebooks of the same height but differently-colored spines (and your flat-opening pages) keep me faithful. Will it kill you to put out a few Rolling Stones Moleskines with plain pages?

Jessica

David Sedaris does.

This advice has worked for us for many years, so at our Writing Boot Camp in July, we’re issuing these pocket notebooks to participants.

Paper cover pocket Moleskine journals I futzed with.

The objective is simple: to start and finish a piece of writing (a short story, a personal essay, or a piece of fanfiction) in two weekends.

Dates: July 22 and 29, 2017, from 1-5pm.
Venue: WSI Corporate Center, Metropolitan Avenue, Makati (near the Makati fire station at the end of Ayala Avenue)
Cost: Php6,000, but if you pay on or before June 30, 2017, you only pay Php5,000.

For inquiries and to book a place, email saffron.safin@gmail.com.