"I would send you a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils..."

I love office supplies. The aisle at the store, so pretty with it’s multi colored sticky notes lined up, it’s sweet smell of ink and paper (so much like a bookstore), and the unbearable possibility of all those blank pages has always been a little hypnotizing to me.

I get crushes on certain items. For one whole summer when I was about eleven, I would visit the same package of 200 felt markers every time we went to Walmart, looking at it longingly with big, wide, adoring eyes. There was the affair with the white out (which logically enough, followed my fling with Sharpies of various sizes and shapes). And the one school year that I could not get enough purple pens to satisfy the empty inkwell in my heart. And these, of course, were besides the notebooks and journals of every size, shape, color, and binding which were my perennial delight. Nothing makes my fingers tingle quite like fresh notebook.

There is a dark side to a love affair with office supplies though. Sometimes they don’t love you back. You may find an item that no matter how much to try to love it, you find that it just makes you feel terrible about yourself, and brings out the worst in you. For me, it was day planners. I spent years believing that if I could just find the perfect planner, then suddenly I’d stop being an absent minded Professor who sometimes forgot her own phone number, and start being an organized Type-A who remembered everything without effort because it would always be properly noted, filed, and tabbed.

Of course, like any relationship where one party expects the other to solve all their problems, it was fated for failure from the start. I have a stack of planners from the last 10 years, some (most) with only one or two days filled in. Others have had their tiny pens, and little sticky note pads pillaged, while the rest of the gutted leather shell lies on the shelf accusing me of being a disorganized mess.

But after a decade of failed flings with various expensive planners, I’ve found my true love. So simple and homely, it’s been keeping me company since I was a little girl, but I never saw its true potential and what it could really mean to me until I gave up my Type-A Martha Stewart dreams, and embraced my inner absent minded Professor.

One day I opened up an old Composition book, and realized that all I’d ever wanted from a Day Planner was right in front of me. My unassuming stack of 80 cent, black-and-white notebooks are old friends now, full of jottings, to do lists, quotations, and monthly budgets, scribbles about books and boys, recipes and phone numbers, meaningless doodles and life goals. No need for color coded tabs, or trying to squish a whole list into one little box on a calendar. They’re a joyful, painful, free flowing, day to day mash up, bound between a couple bits of cardboard.

So days like today, when I find myself wandering down that aisle, I don’t linger over things leather bound, or delight over a handmade journal. I put three new marbled notebooks in my basket with a plop, excited to bring them home and begin a fresh sheet.

_originally posted on fb 5/28/09_