Happy Notebooks

June 13, 2025

according to legend, legend being a brief mention by my mom, i grabbed a pen and notebook during my zhuazhou. there's supposedly a Chinese tradition where parents present to their baby/toddler a collection of various items -- called 抓週 (zhuazhou), "one-year-old catch" according to Wikipedia, and each item symbolizes different interests/careers. whatever the child grabs foretells the child's future (i.e. book = scholar, money = rich). it's like an innate foretelling; what does your one-year-old self truly want?

in Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong describes her "special, almost erotic relationship with [her] stationery" in the chapter Bad English. i didn't expect to resonate with such a descriptor. out of all the inanimate objects i own in life, i probably have the most complex, most intimate relationship with notebooks. i've always seen book-like objects to be bound, precious, published, official; a notebook was my version of officiality, of manufactured professionalism in an era there was absolutely no way for my 5th-grade stories to be of publication quality. i would be a perfectionist; i'd start a notebook thinking that this next clean manuscript will be my next amazing awesome lengthy writing project, just to have it die again when i realize there is no way writing on a notebook without revisions will ever be perfect. perhaps i had a delusion that people wrote manuscripts in notebooks, and when they turned works into the publisher, they'd hand in a handwritten notebook of polished ideas. as a result, i have many quarter-filled, at best half-filled nice notebooks lying around the house.

what should i do with them? complete them? let them be? tear out the nice pages and use them to write letters to my penpals?

i journal consistently every night and i'm proud to reveal that i've fully used up nice notebooks under the mantra that "a happy notebook is a used notebook." i write on eclectic pages; a spiral journal my late grandparents bought for me from Office Depot, travel notebooks that have been with me to Borneo and back, gold and blue books i received as birthday presents, a recycled one with pressed flowers in its cover, a black handmade notebook i picked out from a gift shop in the center of Prague, and currently, a mini light blue cat-themed journal where each page is a different cat design adorning my words.

--- Hey.

For the past several weeks (it's been nearly a month since graduation, how shocking), I've been trying to get my aimless life sorted out. I have both nothing and everything to do at the same time, except now all deadlines are imagined and/or self-inflicted. Gosh! It's like my life is not starting. It refuses to start until some merciful employer sees the merits of hiring me; all I can do right now is volunteer and do work that builds up experience, but I'm so truly exhausted. My daily regimen consists of firing off 2 job apps which is a deceivingly long and arduous process, even if I'm always trying to convince myself otherwise. How do all you employed people do it? I really hate being in this purgatorial situation. And I just know I'll also hate it (once/when) I get a job but I cannot fathom how my desperation has been eating at me this entire time. I guess "pursuing my passions" ends up being a price to pay when your start-up friend-who-has-always-known-what-he'll-do-and-thinks-that-the-humanities-are-for-the-privileged tells you that if you want money, you don't become a marine biologist. It struck a chord because it will always be easier to translate "marine biologist" to Chinese than whatever the fuck I am.

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But today one of my interviews actually worked -- I got a paid 2-week teaching assistantship at a media arts education nonprofit school coming up in July. And even though I still need to strive for a full-time, I'm going to take the wins where I can get it. (Also, I'm going to the East Coast for a week-long solo travel trip soon after!)