Stationery Sagas

Written as part of a blogging assignment for a class at Boston University in 2015, with the intention of continuing it in the future. View the original blog here.

Let me paint you a picture: it’s 11 p.m. and I’m moving about my room, sifting through the unorganized chaos, trying to assemble my requirements for the next day. I’m tired and sleepy. I take a minute to look around—if there ever was a metaphor for my life, my room would be it. I dive back into the rabbit hole of clothes, accessories, miscellaneous items of random use, and then I chance upon a little pile of diaries, forgotten in the corner I’d safely left them in.

If this was a TV show, bright rays of light would begin to shine around those diaries and angels would hum in the background. In case I haven’t made it clear already, I LOVE stationery. It’s not simple fondness or passing admiration; it’s an obsession that has developed over years of what began as an innocent quest for a personal diary as a teenager.

I made my way over to the shrine—I mean, pile—scooped up all of 17961351 diaries and set them on my bed. I got comfortable as I flipped through each one for no reason whatsoever. I chanced upon my latest acquisition—a bold, gold diary with cream pages. Why did I spend money on this diary again? Because it was gold and pretty. Which seemed to be my reasoning for most, if not all my stationery purchases this past year. I was compelled that as a person of design, it was crucial that I acquire all the pretty bits and bobs my hard earned money could buy. Which would explain why I bought a box set of 100 postcards featuring illustrations and animated stills by the Pixar Animation Studio on my trip to the Boston Museum of Science I mentioned in the last post.

I sat there with my diaries, blissfully unaware that I had just wasted another hour of my life. As I stared at the growing pile of stuff that now lay on my bedroom floor, my moment of solitude was interrupted by a sudden thought: ‘What was I looking for again?’