Moving along…

For the time left during which we are living in this city, I want to make an effort to reach some of my goals. Tick off the items on the bucket list. Whittle down the to-do’s. Do life-logging. Those kind of things.

To start?

DO. 

For the love of pen and paper

A neat irony has recently sprung up in my life. It is that just as my commitment to blogging more on hopefully one (of 3) internet blogging platforms has been revitalized, so has an obsession in analog tools been stirred up anew. (What I’ve written below is taken word-for-word from another post of mine.)

I don’t know if it’s because I’m in the “going back to school” mindset (it’s only been, what, 11 years…) but lately I’ve been fascinated by old-fashioned pen-and-paper notetaking. I was in Invermere, BC last week and stumbled into a store that had Rhodia notebooks, and Chapters recently restocked the Moleskine line of 18-month calendar agendas with their classic hardbound, gorgeous black covers and elastic – just the feel of these quality notebooks in my hands has revived an old feeling in me.

Although most of my journalling and notetaking over the past 2 years has been electronic (MacJournal, Evernote, and prior to that on a PC, in MS OneNote), a recent search for old university papers uncovered boxes, literally 3 boxes, of my collected journals/writings/scribbles/doodles.

I had forgotten how colourful journalling could be. The freedom of lined/unlined/graph paper, to doodle here or sketch something there, the power of freehand writing and a thousand other things I was able to do by hand that I haven’t really done on my laptop – these things I’ve missed over the past few years.

So I was pleased to stumble upon this post in the Telegraph from last year about a mini-revival of “analog” note-taking that has emerged recently. Angela Webb of the National Handwriting Association is quoted:

We’ve seen a reverse of the trend in the last two to three years, and people are much more keen to handwrite now. Research is coming though from skilled authors who use handwriting to get ideas flowing and then move to the keyboard to develop them.

This jibes with what readers and writers from a couple of my favorite websites, Lifehacker and GearFire Productivity, have mentioned over and over: brainstorm and jot by hand, shape and finalize by type.

Anyway, it’s been a neglected art in my house, and I think it’s something I look forward to bringing back over the next year.

Now: I’m going to go out and hunt out a fresh, pristine, empty notebook that will be my companion for the next few months.

(Yesterday, I think I found a potential candidate: this Japanese import, Maruman Mnemosyne notebook from Jetpens.com.)

Long time no post and blogging platforms

Well, I mean “no post” in that I haven’t posted something seriously, with intent and deliberateness, in a good while.

It’s just that juggling 2 photo blogs, one media studies site, one grad studies journal site, one random tumblog and one random posterous site takes a lot of work. A bit MUCH? Yah, I’d say so.

I’ve decided that come September I will cull, cut and merge these sites. It’s just NUTS and I’ve left off writing HERE on WordPress, to maintain the other ones. Mind you, the other ones are easier, in a way, because it’s one click to post a photo or link or quote and add commentary or write a response on Tumblr and Posterous. I find their ways of managing posting eaiser than the WordPress version of the “press” bookmarklet.

However, I do think WordPress is the more….. “serious” platform, among the three. That is, great writing and content is peppered throughout WordPress blogs, which have been around longer, and I’ve found that sharing something on Tumblr or Posterous takes a lot less creative output except in the curation part, and that doesn’t take THAT much creativity. (That’s not to say there aren’t great tumblogs and posterous sites out there – there are, for example The Political Notebook, an awesome news commentary blog, a new favorite of mine ).

If my goal is to keeping writing and to share WORDS, then is WordPress better for me? It’s a moot point, I think, for anyone: platform doesn’t matter as much as the ACT of writing.

But for me, the clutter and busy-ness of maintaining different sites is distracting me from the simple act and intention to just write more, rather than spending time re-posting and re-blogging.  It’s become an excuse NOT to keep writing. Thus, I want to narrow it down and CHOOSE (another act that is sometimes hard to follow up on).

And I don’t want to become one of the thousands (100s of thousands?) of people who have started a blog that fizzled out because they were not able to make time for it or to because it became one of those projects that fell on the wayside.

I’ve had people encourage me to keep up writing, because I actually do have a voice that can be clear and can share interesting things. I think the appropriate response to that is that then, 1) I need to keep up the practice and 2) I need to read and see and notice better, carefully, so that my voice will have worthwhile things to say.

One life lesson & stranger a week

I am so so inspired by 52 Cups of Coffee, a tumblog I stumbled upon one night.

I don’t want to rip off the exact idea, but I think I will consciously make an effort in fall, in Calgary, to connect with at least one person a week and make one observation or gain one insight from such connection, hopefully learning something that is related to one’s pursuit of higher ed.

Exploring Calgary

Waiting for the train to take me to the University of Calgary

I took a couple of days off and went to check out a potential graduate school. One thing I can about the University of Calgary Communications Department: the staff and faculty are welcoming, responsive and very helpful. It’s going to make my trip enjoyable.

This skin of mine

Prompt: December 25 – Photo – a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

Honestly, I’ve always loved to take photos of myself but I really got into self-documenting after I graduated from law school and was living on my own. In my mind, that period is linked with rebuilding and finding myself after living my 20s trying to please others and to win their affirmation rather than really thinking about what I wanted and living with identified purposes and direction.

The photo, taken in June 2010, shows a joyous me – assured, fearless, and not fretting over obstacles – and it’s andy-warholish-pop-arty, which I really like. I’m not always this way, but it is a representation of the woman I have grown into and the best that I can be at times, that I can feel at at times, as me – not just as a friend, colleague, mother, wife, sister, daughter – but as me, alone and with God, in joy and in confidence.

After 10 years, I’ve grown into this skin, am more confident than I was in my 20s, more assured in faith, my own identity, my abilities, and in my sense of belonging in community and family.

The certainty isn’t constant – it comes and goes through the weeks – and for the rest of the time I try to learn and relearn to listen to the inner instinct or Holy Spirit or intuition that prompts me to run after the best.