Recycling The Good Times

There’s nothing quite like opening a new notebook. The cracking sound with the turn of every stiff page not yet softened by time and use; the smell of processed paper, still slightly chemical; and, of course, gliding a pen along a line, crossing a new page for the first time.

Not only did I keep most of the notebooks I owned after high-school - even ones from the college program I dropped out of - but carried them with me when I moved out of my parents’ house. My notebooks now live in a drawer I often revisit when feeling homesick or, worse, if I need to find that one reference, text or drawing from who knows how long ago. I flip through page after page, filled with walls of text, then, suddenly, a blank. A block of naked pages that still felt brand new, but never used.

I was sitting on the ground, staring at one of those blank pages. A vinyl record spun on the player and I battled a thought: “It must be 10 pages. What’s the point of filling them out now?”

The hollow scratching of the needle on the record gradually filled the room. The song ended, and I didn’t care much for it. The record was a new acquisition of mine, the artist was unknown to me, but the cover caught my eye when I was searching through a box of free LPs left on the sidewalk. As the vinyl record slid back in its sleeve, I was thinking: “Should I keep it just for the cover?"

Right then, sitting on my bedroom floor, wearing Halloween pajamas, holding a record I didn’t like on one hand and a an almost filled notebook on the other, the idea hit me. I ran to my drawer and pulled out all of my notebooks. I pulled each blank page out of different colored spirals and placed them on the ground. By the time the last page landed atop the pile, there was enough paper for one notebook.

In full transparency, I needed supplies I didn’t have to finish this project. So, the next day, I took my arts and crafts to my day job, where office supplies are abundant and barely used. With the long-bladed scissors, I cut out the scraggly pieces of paper that previously held the pages to the spirals.

As I trim the edges of my pages, I hear, over my shoulder, my co-worker’s voice: “You’re not doing it right.” He offered to help, without knowing what I was doing, then insisted on it to the point of trying to take the paper out of my hands. I may hate mansplaining as much as the next person, but this hit differently.

The first time I attempted to make my own notebook, I was much younger and relied on help from an arts and crafts master, my mom. That book has a fabric cover, braided bookmark and it is sitting in my drawer to this day. There was no way this notebook would turn out as beautiful, the edges were already looking a little rough, but it would be all mine.

I measured the record sleeve to fit the freshly-trimmed paper, and snipped two pieces of it from squares to rectangles, keeping as many of the elements on the cover as I could. After all the cutting was done, I punched three holes onto each page, sandwiched them between the two pieces of the record sleeve, and sewed it all together with burgundy thread whilst re-listening to Third World's Sense of Purpose.

When I opened it, I heard the same crack, smelled the faint chemical smell and smiled when my pen reached the other end of the lined page. Ta-da! My new notebook - as Delia Deetz would say - not mine as in I bought it, mine as in I made it.