The Pasted Word

Sorry about not posting yesterday (or the day before. Hello 1:15am!)...I'm sick with the black lung, pop! Oh, how I want to watch Zoolander now. I think I just caught a cold, which is a silly name. I know some people feel chills when they have a cold, but I just feel horrible. Oh well, life goes on!

In any case, it's show and tell.

Starting back in last August, I'm going to say a few weeks before I left California for DC, I decided I would like a notebook. Not just a run-of-the-mill, picked-it-up at Barnes and Noble or Borders notebook. No, I wanted something unique, that I would love to carry around and scribble notes, lists and doodles in. Harkening back to my days in elementary school, where girls would cut and paste words from magazines and decorate their binders with them (now that I think about it, my 10 year old friends cutting up issues of their mom's Cosmo and putting words like "sexy" and "hot" on their binders seems wrong), I decided to take direct inspiration from the magazines I read. All the magazines I read on a frequent basis can be listed on one hand: Budget Travel, Conde Nast Traveler, Mental Floss and that's it. Sometimes Time, Foreign Policy and Newsweek, or my brother's Popular Science if I felt the urge. Anywho, so my notebooks definitely had a travel vibe with a bit of random tossed in. I thought I'd show you the three (well, 4, but I made one for my dear friend Mikendra as a Christmas gift) I've made so far.

The original! I didn't realized I had to a certain extent color coordinated each cover until after I had made them. I put clear polypropylene (cellophane) over the covers, so they'd be protected.


Number 2...unfortunately, this one didn't get a covering, so it got beaten up pretty quickly (I believe I took it across the country three or four times...no wonder!) I love the back cover on this one.


And here is number three, the one I am currently using. Of all of them, the front cover on this one is my favorite. I used clippings from Mental Floss for most of it, with I think a bit from Budget Travel. Here is a closer look at it:


I love these things. Sure, cut-and-paste isn't original, but the results distinctly are, always. It is a personalized space in which to write the overflowing fluttering thoughts in my head. Oh! I've got it: these little cut-and-paste covers reflect the purpose of the notebooks: to create something like order out of the seeming chaos of my mind. There's my concise reflective thought of the night.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. I keep sneezing and coughing and it is not a pretty sight. Good night!