Page One
Notebooks of all sorts were a prominent feature of primary school life—the single line notebook for journalling, the small blue notebook for mental sums, the squared notebook for xí zì (Chinese character writing practice) and the jotter book for purposes that I can't recall. What I do remember, however, is very gladly following my teachers' directions to fill my notebooks in the way that they would specify. In the case of the jotter book, it went somewhat like this: a line at the left with the day, a line at the right with the date, a line at the centre with the title, a picture in the middle and lines at the bottom with a descriptive sentence.
I was quite an eager student, and I found pleasure in filling up my notebooks as instructed and adhering to the structure provided. Over the course of each academic year, the pristine notebooks would indent, smudge, crease, fatten and, at some point, be completely filled. There is something quite satisfying in leafing through a notebook full of marks, bumps and a story to tell—a notebook that has fulfilled its intended purpose.
Strangely, yet not surprisingly, the school notebooks were the only ones that achieved that level of success. The many other notebooks that walked through my life, though prettier than the plain school ones, were either unfilled, less than half-filled, or gradually grew thinner as I ripped off page after page after page—perfectionism is terribly unforgiving, and ADHD means that my interest wanes almost as quickly as my spontaneity arises. Ah, my life! It is as amusing as it is frustrating.
And it is this life that I want to begin to document, this me that I want to understand and these thoughts that I want to capture in The Jotter Nook—a little webspace of my own in this increasingly wide web—a jotter book that I hope would grow and fatten as I continue on this roller coaster journey of life.