I must confess. I have joined the dark side.

The dark side of Moleskinerie, to be more precise. As mentioned here, I recently purchased a Moleskine diary. It’s a pocket-sized monthly one. I was expecting it to be larger actually, but I guess I’ll go for the large version next year. However, this one is really convenient as it doesn’t take up a lot of space, obviously. About half of it is monthly planners, and the other half is a notebook. I’m not creative at all when it comes to artsy-fartsy stuff and I can’t even draw a stick-man properly, so I guess I’m mostly sticking to writing. However, it might suddenly bring out an artsy side to me that I’ve never known about, lol.

I quite enjoy looking at other artsy moleskines, and I came across calligraphy. For some reason I own six fountain pens, amongst them one for italics. Most of these are old and some of them are from elementary school, but they still work!

I forgot how nice it is to write with a fountain pen, so perhaps I’ll ever manage to create something fancy like this kick-ass artist.

I tend to keep a lot of old stuff, such as tickets and leaflets from trips I’ve made, old concert tickets, personal diaries, but also the planners I’ve used through the years. Today I came across my old planners again and was amused at the ‘evolution’.

The first planner I ever got was for my first year in high school, 1998-1999. I chose a “pop music” planner with lots of pictures from pop groups that were popular at the moment. I don’t think it too long before I completely destroyed the thing and started adding a shitload of photos from music magazines, (uhm, my music taste was quite horrible at that moment) lots of scribbles from myself and friends, hearts for my boyfriend and anything remotely interesting I came across.

The next one for 1999-2000 was mostly a plain planner, which I gave a new shiny blue cover and again added lots of photos from magazines and print outs. Looks like my taste in music improved at least a bit during this time!

The following year was a Southpark planner. It’s a ring binder and basically I could re-use it, but buying a new agenda for the next year seemed a much better idea. I remember getting into a fight with my mom about it, because she was paying for my school stuff and this one was twice as expensive as the amount she gave me for it, lol. It was a day-by-day diary, something which annoyed me so after that I went back to weekly agendas.

After that one, I stopped messing up my planners and decorating with anything I could find. The next three years I had rather plain ones. The red one was my first year of university (Academy for pop culture) and which I got for free somewhere. Surprisingly, I found some images in the 2002-2003 one: photos of J-rock artists. So I guess I started to become interested in Japanese music in 2002 already, for some reason I thought it was a few years later.

Then, my planners became even tinier, because they were far easier to take along. I also changed from school planners to yearly ones. They only have meetings and deadlines inside, no pictures. The one from 2009 and the one from 2011 are Barbapapa planners because I’m just so mature, lol. I got both of them in Japan and they are monthly planners, which I ended up liking much more than a weekly one. Around the same time, I’ve also started to use Google’s Calendar, which I really enjoy because it’s just so convenient and I can also maintain a diary for JaME.

However, the tiny Barbapapa one I have now has starting to annoy me lately. Even though my handwriting is tiny enough for it (it’s 8×12 cm), halfway through this year I suddenly got the urge to get a new one. Although I’m annoyed with myself for changing in May, I’m hoping my pretty new Moleskine monthly notebook will live up to my expectations and hopefully bring some creativity back, too.

Exactly one year ago, I had just come home after a trip with my friend Cynthia to New York City. Seeing as I arrived at six in the morning, I got the worst jetlag ever and it took a few days to recover.

Anyway, seeing as I’m ‘only’ a year late, I thought it was about time to post the photos. Cynthia and I did all the typical touristy things, which was lots of fun!

On our arrival day, we checked in to our hostel in Brooklyn and then took the metro to Times Square. On the second day we basically explored all of Lower Manhattan. We started off with a trip to the Statue of Liberty Island, then went to Wall Street, the World Trade Center site, China Town and Little Italy.

Our trip included The Metropolitan Museum of Art which was definitely on my NYC to-do list. Although the Greek, Aboriginal and modern stuff didn’t really interest me, they had some great works by the European masters. We also visited the American Museum of Natural History, which wasn’t really my thing, lol.

Also on our to-do list was to walk the Brooklyn Bridge. After we failed to do it on one of the nights because we accidentally fell asleep, lol, we finally walked across it to see all the pretty shiny lights.

We of course went to take a walk in Central Park as well, which totally killed our feet. We were even such tired bums that we decided to take a bicycle taxi to Strawberry Fields, the memorial for John Lennon who was killed nearby. We also undertook a trip to Coney Island because Cynthia liked doing so, and for some reason we decided to do it at night, lol. It was lots of fun though!

During this holiday, I also developed the Japanese habit of taking photos of my food. Here we go!