Late Night Journal Writing

Greetings from (one of) your favourite stationery shop clerk(s), from deep within her office/closet, cluttered up with treasures of various levels of objective value. I am hiding away, babies asleep, cats swishing their tails, telling their tales.

These days have been busy in lovely and tedious and funny and stressful ways. These are the days with my babies! The other day, in an effort to buy myself some time to do some non-productive tapping on my keyboard, I allowed Junia to play in the pantry and she spent several studious and quiet minutes tearing the straws off all the juice boxes, and I regret everything deeply. Time is moving at warp speed except when it stops so I can contemplate whether or not the suspicious nacho “cheese” sauce is still good, along with my anxiety, and then text Jon aggressively about both while he’s trying to Get Things Done at the shop.

On Thursday, I had to go into the Easton’s Centre, downtown, to pick something up last minute. I thought I had escaped the Black Friday madness, but then! Michael Bublé came to perform (??) in the middle of the mall (???) and it was like I was stuck in these crowds of people and their phones and very, very festive music blasting directly through my ears into my spine, and for a second I really thought I was never going to escape, like Tom Hanks in the airport.

In any case, how are everyone’s journals doing? I am still writing in mine, and my notebooks remain my cherished companions, even as I enjoy the traitorous behaviour of browsing new notebooks and notebook systems.

Some days I am enjoying the process, in my squirrel state of scribbling things down frenetically, other days it’s a few lines about nothing. I’m continuing on with the philosophy that you have to consistently write about what might essentially be nothing—the walk to school, the dinner that you ate, the chores left undone—before you unearth the real things, before you begin the noticing. There is lots to notice these days, before it all brushes past me.