Friday Joy: My Not-Cool Journal

It's the opposite of hustle culture. Also: the best pen + notebook combo, according to me & possibly Stanley Kubrick.

Welcome to Friday Joy! This is a weekly short piece on something that is making me happy, and a few recommendations for articles, recipes, and other things to check out. I hope it brings something good into the end of your week.

Outtake from my headshot photoshoot. I definitely always journal with styled hair in autumnal outdoor settings and not in my pajamas on the couch. // Photo: Beth Liebetrau

There is something deeply uncool about saying you journal. I'm trying to think about why. Maybe it just sounds indulgent, taking time to write about yourself, which serves no apparent purpose to anyone but you. It's the opposite of hustle culture and the opposite of promoting your personal brand. Judging from my journal, my brand is Person Who Writes About Extremely Boring Things & Complains A Lot. Which is as it should be.

So yes. I journal. I have been writing my thoughts down privately since I was young enough to have a pink-paged diary with a puffy cover and a little padlock to keep my younger sister out. But I didn't get into the practice of journaling—the steady rhythm and daily habit—until the end of college, when I read The Artist's Way and started doing morning pages, as Julia Cameron calls them. Three pages long-hand, every morning with my coffee. It's a glorious thing, until you have a kid. Then it feels impossible.

Eight years ago, after my older son was born, things got very intermittent. I wrote maybe once a month, in an old school notebook that still had a few pages of Community Nutrition notes in the front. I wrote at all times of the day, whenever I found a pocket of quiet and needed to process something.

2021 was a really hard year. I lost a person important to me, we had to put our 10-year-old dog down very suddenly, a tornado hit our street, and we moved across the country while I was still working full-time remotely, so my desk was a cardboard box for three weeks. That was all in the first six months. I didn't even open my journal between May and December. When I did, and read the last few entries, I just cried. Sometimes you have to wait out the bumps. Sometimes you don't want them on paper.

Early 2022 was hard in a different way. I got a new job, but it was a bad fit. My dissatisfaction felt all-consuming. My brand was Person Who Complains A Lot About the Same Very Specific & Probably Unimportant Things, and my journal was the only appropriate place to promote that brand. I started writing daily, but in the evenings after my kids were in bed. It was my life raft; it was the only thing keeping me from floating facedown in the lukewarm kiddie pool of disappointment I found myself in.

If you journal regularly, the truth will eventually catch up to you. You can only be boring and repetitive for so long before you're like, Ugh, I hate you and you need to change something ASAP because I cannot listen to this anymore. "You" being you, because if you journal regularly, you realize there is no one else who can change your life for you.

So I did. And here I am. It wasn't that clean and simple, of course—but I also think it would have been messier, and I would have been unhappier for much longer, if I hadn't had that space away from the judgment of everyone else, where I could slowly untangle the big mess I had made for myself.

So yes. I journal. And I think I always will.

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What I'm Into This Week

The Best Journal + Pen Combo

Not specific to this week, but it seemed like an appropriate time to shout out my favorite combination of notebook and pen. If you cannot possibly imagine noticing or having an opinion on such a matter, move along, move along.¹ This recommendation is not for you. If you get me, then you probably already know the delights of Japanese stationery and writing utensils. I had heard good things about paper from Midori, so I decided to try the A5 Midori Diary and it is the perfect size, with little tactile details like a ribbon marker and nubbly exposed binding. The paper is really smooth and lovely to write on, especially with Marvy Le Pen fine point felt-tip pens, which I first heard about in Ross Gay's The Book of Delights. They are truly a delight!

Cooking

We hosted a successful Fall Fête over the weekend, and I decided to cook an old standby to accompany my friend Adam's ridiculously good homemade pastrami sandwiches: Roasted Winter Vegetables with Miso-Lime Dressing. It turns roasted vegetables into something a little more umami, a little brighter, and despite the inclusion of miso paste, not identifiably Japanese—so you can really eat them with anything, including pastrami sandwiches. It's also very flexible in your choice of vegetables; this time around, I used buttercup squash, shiitake mushrooms, cabbage wedges, and cauliflower.

Thinking About

The Curious Case of Gina Adams: A “Pretendian” investigation by Michelle Cyca and Culture Study's interview with Michelle Cyca. With universities looking to quickly increase the number of Indigenous faculty members to better support Indigenous students, there has been an uptick in "Pretendian" cases—faculty members who actually don't have the tribal affiliations or ancestral connections they claim, who are essentially white people pretending to be Native. But it is more complicated than that, because for a long time, the US and Canadian governments were actively trying to disconnect Indigenous children from their communities and cultures, so the process of "proving" that connection through documents and blood tests can be traumatic and intrusive. This investigation of one case in Canada is nuanced and personal, but centers the systemic failures of the university system to address the problem. I also really enjoyed Culture Study’s behind the scenes interview with the writer of the piece, who is Indigenous, and learning about her decision to bring her personal perspective into the framing of the story.

Heads up: I am the guest on this week’s episode of the Can I Have Another Snack? podcast, anti-diet nutritionist Laura Thomas’s audio companion to her wonderful newsletter of the same name. Thank you for having me, Laura!

1. For the record, I took a class on Stanley Kubrick in college and one fact that I remember very clearly is that Kubrick’s preproduction work for 2001: A Space Odyssey included months (months!) of searching for the perfect pen and paper combination for writing his notes for the film. I have no citation for this and I don’t know what he chose. Let’s pretend it was the Midori Diary and a set of Le Pens.