Blank Book

I've got a love affair with blank books. I browse the shelves in the bookstore, imagining myself writing in each and every one of them. There's the travel journal (I can catalogue all the road trips we take!), the prayer journal (write prayer requests and answers!), the journal with the artistic, nature-inspired cover (I can write about the way that shaft of light just hit the roadside daisies today as they whipped around in the pre-thuderstorm wind!).

Inevitably, they end up sitting on my bookshelves at home, each with one or two entries in the first few pages. All the fantasies about journaling every day go crashing down to the ground.

So I made up a rule: no buying a new journal unless 1) the old journal has ten or fewer blank pages left, 2) the very perfect journal turns up on the bookstore shelves or the grocery store shelves or the used bookstore shelves, and 3) we can afford it.

That third one has been tough these days. (A tank of gas is like forty dollars! Like, zoiks, man!) I try to discipline myself to buy a seventy-five-cent composition notebook and just decorate the cover with magazine photos (artfully cropped and collaged, of course), but it's hard. Because I want. I want it!*

Ok, so I got a little sidetracked. But I'm needing a new blank book for sermon notes. I realized today that I'll probably only make it through one more Sunday till I need a new one. So there...I have a week (give or take a few days) to decide if I'm going to be good and just settle for a composition notebook--or if I'm going to look around for a nice, cool, pretty, reasonably-priced blank book that I will tote to church every Sunday for the next few months. (If I'm going to have it with me that often, I have to feel as if I'm going to like it for at least that long.)

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*I heard a little child in the store saying that very thing. I hear it all the time. Little children react to stimuli exactly how we all react; they are the only ones that don't know how to filter their reactions to the so carefully constructed stimuli that make them feel like they want. Think of that next time you are in a store, feeling like you absolutely must buy that ____ in order to make you truly happy.