I was all about the spiral Five Star notebooks at one point of my academic career. The durable covers withstood any backpack catastrophes and the interior pocket folder provided an extra organizational boost. I bought one for each class my first two semesters. These notebooks still contained so many unmarked leaves by the end of classes, so I knew I had to downsize. Taking notes in college classes turned out to be a less taxing process–doodles more than likely filled the margins most of the time, only drawing attention to the more important points on the lined page. Occasionally, I’d even transcribe the cover of the novel I was reading. (Sorry, professors.)
Have you ever examined old notebooks or writing assignments lovingly preserved from grade school? I sometimes peek at the random Five Stars lingering in my bedroom. Did I really perfect every curl and align every letter within the margins? Did I really write with sparkly gel pens in jewel tones? (God bless elementary school teachers.) At each point, I knew I always liked the way my hand drew words on the page, but now, I shudder with terror. I can’t bring myself to appreciate it at the purely aesthetic level. The pencil, the ball point pen–it all forms atrocious and repulsive patterns to my more mature eyes. Although I don’t honestly believe that one’s handwriting has any profound, illuminative meaning, I find its evolution is nonetheless intriguing.
And then I look at more recent, collegiate notepads. The black Sharpie ink fills lines with literary knowledge in an impeccable, minute scrawl. Indeed, my handwriting shrunk significantly to accommodate smaller margins–perhaps attributed to a heightened attentiveness, but more likely to an overwhelming preoccupation with aesthetics. Incomplete thoughts had to at least look good on the college-ruled paper.
There’s also that moment during study abroad where you realize you actually need school supplies, and usually, this a communal awareness which later requires a mass exodus to the nearest office supplies shop. It feels novel, yet also nostalgic, first from running errands in a new city (how charming!), but then from remembering the lines which wound through Staples the night before that first day of school. The major difference being, of course, that you’re with new faces, debating about the exchange rate for a five-pound notebook, versus with parents, watching from behind as they tender over the cash for Lisa Frank and milky pens (don’t forget those jelly pencil grips, too).
For some reason, I was seriously opposed to shelling out cash for any sort of effectively bound notebook. I reached for the 99p reams of unlined Ryman A4 paper, held together by that glue that always ripped construction paper once needed for safety-scissor art projects. There, I noted well in three columns, while tiny letters formed an architectural landscape on the romanticism of Wordsworth and the tempo of Eliot, a contemporary masterpiece that could hang in the Tate Modern–“Notes from the Undergrad.”
My mother, whose own handwriting I could recognize anywhere–that curly nurse’s scrawl, barely legible, and usually in shorthand, is always concerned that the post office can never read the addresses I print, and that therefore whatever I’m mailing will achieve some sort of limbo, doomed to the island of misfit inscriptions. But I don’t care. It’s so satisfying to witness ink, always threatening to bleed out from under the fine-point felt tip, respect the boundaries of my handwriting, a perfect power play over language and design. (I willingly volunteer myself for My Strange Addiction, by the way.)
I wish I could say that the notebooks from my senior year are worthy of a retrospective gallery exhibition, the kind of artifact researchers look for and relish in when uncovering the secrets of an intellectual figure’s past. Except I only have stray marble notebooks that bind English modernism and Earth science, migration literature and novel theory. I have Five Star folders bursting with scratch paper that clings desperately to notes on imperial Roman architecture and ancient Greek declensions. Words are barely intelligible, formed by an odd half-print, half-cursive font. With fewer than sixty days to graduation, my hand has formally “given up,” and that’s only when it feels remotely compelled to write at all. (There’s a certain accomplishment in attending a three hour class, and then finding that the only commentary resides within the margins of a spine-worn novel.)
It’s either a sign that I’m momentarily letting up, and the effects of my note neuroses finally are taking their toll, or that I’m evolving into that one professor whose office bursts at the seams, in which notes consume every available surface, and there’s no organizational system in practice whatsoever. (The most hair-brained are the most fun, right?) At the same time, it’s clear the Five Star notebook gene seems no longer part of my DNA. It’s an incurable mutation. And yet, of course, there’s probably still a recessive trait for organization lurking, but it’s more likely Three Star than Five.
